tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-76554062024-03-07T06:26:02.042+01:00Apostate WindbagVictor Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02227614963664976833noreply@blogger.comBlogger183125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7655406.post-36280264987143635312007-08-17T04:08:00.000+02:002007-08-17T05:23:07.839+02:00More Enlightenmentmonging from Romana’s hubby<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhTqBvUDMlfz6rmRsD3lfwcSD2iJmhe0Aq2a0kKV8-VTkE8yX4e9qo8e8tLPJGaloG7k9ER-5tMs5N5C6Lup_-yntth9mJaQDl1lr3AtjPGE21uEwDu2j1QDkyqK_7qEOgA9h71w/s1600-h/Dawkins.Xmas320.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhTqBvUDMlfz6rmRsD3lfwcSD2iJmhe0Aq2a0kKV8-VTkE8yX4e9qo8e8tLPJGaloG7k9ER-5tMs5N5C6Lup_-yntth9mJaQDl1lr3AtjPGE21uEwDu2j1QDkyqK_7qEOgA9h71w/s320/Dawkins.Xmas320.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5099486506548012034" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />An analogy [one you’ll probably not find on this year’s SATs]:<br /><br />The Enlightenment is to Richard Dawkins and his transatlantic conceited coterie of atheo-fundamentalist cocks [I do mean that in the sense of ‘being proud as a’ and not in the sense of ‘as rigid as a’ – although now that I think about it, that could just about work too], Hitchens, Harris, Amis and McEwan, as a plunger handle is to a racist frat-boy marine at Abu Ghraib: used the wrong way round and up the bums of Muslims. In other words, for a purpose entirely in opposition to that for which it was originally intended.<br /><br />[Furthering the phallic allusion here for just one tendentious and possibly thoroughly supererogatory second longer – It is remarkable is it not, that once upon a time, middle-aged left-wing men with diminishing little-general capacities just bought lavishly redundantly fast Italian roadsters and a mistress younger than their daughter, but these days, it’s always the luckless Enlightenment that seems to get the blood coursing through the old soixant-huitard schlong. I say, a shot of that Robespierre must work monstrously better than those diamond-shaped blue pills.]<br /><br />In the unwitting or witting service of imperialism and Islamophobia normally is the ill-fitting purpose for which he and others wield the Enlightenment. But he’s at it again, and this time that smug, expensively coiffed salt-and-pepper bouffant of an evolutionary biologist is using his Manichean ill-read caricature of the Enlightenment and reason for more – oh and I do hate this word, but there’s nothing else for it – <span style="font-style: italic;">classist</span> motivations.<br /><br />In his new two-part series, <a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8669488783707640763">Enemies of Reason</a>, in perhaps what is a correction to an oversight from his last series, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Root of All Evil</span>, he is attacking new-age flim-flammery, not merely established religion. He aims to show how silly, silly, silly people are who believe in dowsing, alternative medicine, spiritualism, mediums, crystal balls, tarot cards, astrology and the rest of the panorama of such ‘free-thinking’ applesauce.<br /><br />I say correction, as his last series had only aimed at converting everyone to atheism, while it is, sadly, more than entirely plausible, if irrational, to be both an atheist, or, more precisely, someone who puts down ‘secular’ or ‘no religion’ on census forms, and simultaneously believe that the planet Mercury has some passing influence on whether you’ll finally get that promotion to second-assistant fartcatcher to your department’s under-manager of company stationary monitoring, or that an ascending Venus means that you and everyone else born in the same month as you will find true, ineffably soul-nourishing love before week’s end. There is not a small number of people who don’t go to church these days, but an unhappily large percentage of them still believe in palm reading, Echinacea and homeopathy, hang tacky first-nations dreamcatchers off their porches, and would rather step out into a street full of traffic than walk under a ladder that mid-pavement was leant against a building. One might here repetitively reflect that it is not, as G.K. Chesterton apparently never did say, that when people leave the church they will believe in nothing, it is that they will believe in anything.<br /><br />I have little quarrel with Dawkins’ understandable impatience with people’s belief in this bricolage of infantillist nonsense <span style="font-style: italic;">per se</span>. I have no time for any of this bullshit myself when I encounter it amongst people I know. On Free Tibet marches I used to attend years ago, whatever the injustice of the Maoist occupation, I always cringed when the crowd launched into chants of ‘Long live the Dalai Lama’. Rather, the concern I have is the class frame that this inheritor of the Earldom of Lincoln uses to scaffold his prosecution.<br /><br />It is quite striking how the accent of almost every single one of the objects of his scorn in the documentary, including even the rather bumbling astrologer for the Observer (I know! It passed me by too. I’d never even noticed that the Observer had an astrology column. That <span style="font-style: italic;">and</span> the constipated Nick Cohen! That’s it, I’m switching to, er, wait, the Indy has one too, I’ll bet, doesn’t it?), are so very far from Dawkie’s studiously deathless yet chipmunkish RP. From the scouse aura-photographer and the pink-cardiganed psychic energy tutor to poor swishy Simon the mancunian tarot hustler who, to be honest, got rather rumbled by Dick, to Craig the spiritualist minister, to Ken the dousing Cornishman who refuses to admit his dousing skill doesn’t work when it’s disproven before his eyes. Isn’t he simple? Poor, deluded, unsophisticated Ken.<br /><br />Yet the sceptic magician, Derren Brown, who, like Houdini once did, debunks spiritualists and is on Dawkins’ side, has only the lightest hint of regulation-meeja-personality Estuary, and only by his forward-mouthed U’s can you tell that Dawkins' other fellow rationalist in the film, the psychologist dousing-demystifier, Chris French, must have spent some time oop north before university. It’s been a long time since one could definitively tell a person’s class from her accent, but yet, there’s something there. Dawkins is schoolmaster, not academic here.<br /><br />Dawkins, far from even having any empathy for these people, holds them in the utmost dersision. Worse still, he offers no explanation for this latter-day growth in superstition and belief in the supernatural. It simply is. ‘Reason has a battle on its hands.’ ‘Science is under attack.’ ‘[There is] an epidemic of irrational superstitious thinking.’<br /><br />Rather than recognising the foolishness of their thinking but understanding and explaining where it might have come from, he all but calls them fools to their faces with his own sneering, taunting visage.<br /><br />The closest he comes to a reason for this contagion of the cockamamie is his unsupported assertion that there is ‘a prejudice against science in schools’ and that university science departments are closing around the country. He also gives ‘postmodern relativism’ a bit of a short and ungratifying poking. However lamentable the state of science education may be, and however much postmodernism in its sundry flavours deserves a good, sharp wedgie, I’d like to offer a more quotidian explanation.<br /><br />Karl Marx, perhaps the most noted of all noted atheists, gave a generation of American anti-communists a gift with which to beat domestic left-wingers – with his epigram describing ‘religion [a]s the opiate of the masses’. Throughout the cold war, this, from his <span style="font-style: italic;">Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right</span>, was considered the most arrogant of phrases and perhaps more of a reason to condemn socialism than any conclusions or prescriptions in the rest of his egalitarian philosophy. The emphasis was always on the ‘godless’ part of the ‘godless commie bastard’ felicitation. But in fact, the rarely printed complete quotation, far from arrogant, is full of empathy and at the same time offers a clear, obvious explanation as to why people believe in religion, or in this case, new-age mumbo-jumbo:<br /><blockquote><br />Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.</blockquote><br /><br />It is the wretched condition of the world that gives rise to these uninflatable spiritual life-preservers that people cling to.<br /><br />People have believed and continue to believe in superstition, whether of the established religious or new-age category not simply as Dawkins imagines because it offers an (incorrect) explanation of where the universe comes from and gives hope that we live on after we die, but also because life as a peasant, or industrial worker in earlier times, and in latter days a shelf-stacker at Wal-Mart or an at-any-moment-outsourced call-centre worker, is so fraught with hardness, with precarity, with loss, unfairness and poverty, that religion offers a meaning, a structure, a reassurance that things will be better after we die, that no matter what, someone loves me. However lonely I may be, there’s always somebody on my side. That if I believe hard enough, and pray enough, maybe I will get that job promotion. The false hope that comes from today’s Mystic Megs is no different.<br /><br />I don’t know if anyone’s done any studies of this sort of thing, but it would be interesting to find out how many prayers or questions of tarot readers, ask not about healing or romance, but about personal economic matters – jobs, bills, credit cards, debt, mortgage payments, car loans, will there be enough money to pay for the kids’ Christmas presents? When despairing people go to these charlatans, it is more in search for hope in a world that offers none than anything.<br /><br />Richard Dawkins’ father was a colonial officer in Malawi, at the time Nyasaland. The family is listed in Burke’s Landed Gentry as the ‘Dawkins of Over Norton’. He is married to the Honourable Sarah Ward, daughter of the Seventh Viscount Bangor, George Plantagenet, descendant of the 1st Duke of Clarence, brother of King Edward IV [and, yes, spods, also the second Romana on Doctor Who]. How very clever he was to have been born into and married into such families who could deliver the likes of him unto Oxford, and not some undereducated line of Cornish tin miners.<br /><br />I should say here that it is not I who is saying that superstition is the province of the working classes, and atheism the realm of the well-off and educated, but Dawkins himself.<br /><br />In 2002, Dawkins gave a talk, ‘<a href="http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/113">An Atheist’s Call to Arms</a>’ at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, which describes itself onanistically as ‘an invitation-only event where the world's leading thinkers and doers gather to find inspiration’. Another World Economic Forum-style circle jerk, in non-PR-speak, in other words. Some of the sort of people who attend TED may well be <span style="font-style: italic;">galacticos</span> of the academy (who won’t be so poorly compensated in any case), but for the most part they are the unforgivably rich.<br /><br />The talk was much of the usual, unobjectionable bigging up of atheism Dawkins is good at, although unknowingly, his shirt collar was caught underneath his blazer lapel the whole time. Oh the shame of such a boner in such august company. At one point, he asked:<br /><blockquote><br />Is there any correlation positive or negative between intelligence and tendency to be religious? … A recent article by Paul G. Bell in the Mensa magazine…[shows that from] 43 studies carried out since 1927 on the relationship between religious belief and one’s intelligence or educational level, all but four found an inverse connection. That is, the higher one’s intelligence or educational level, the less one is likely to be religious…There are people in this audience easily capable of financing a massive research survey to settle the question.</blockquote><br /><br />A couple of times he hinted to his bloatedly moneyed audience that the battle against religion would be financially costly, and then he came out and just said it. He begged for money from them:<br /><br /><blockquote>This is an elite audience…I suspect a fair number of [you] despise religion as much as I do… And if you’re one of them, I’m asking you to stop being polite and come out and say so. And if you happen to be rich, give some thought about ways in which you might make a difference. The religious lobby in this country is massively financed by foundations such as the Templeton Foundation and the Discovery Institute. We need an anti-Templeton.</blockquote><br /><br />In a world in which there was less imperialism, less poverty, less competition, more social solidarity – in a more just world – there would be less need for religious fundamentalism and new age mumbo-jumbo.<br /><br />Yet ironically, it is these captains of industry to whom Dawkins attends, fellates, cap in hand, begging them to fund his ‘militant atheism’ movement, the very commanding heights whose capitalist methods are responsible for the poverty, social dislocation, and imperial drive for war that incubate the despair that produces the wounds to which religion and new-age obscurantism are salve and balm.<br /><br />In a further irony, as literary critic Terry Eagleton <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html">noted</a> in the London Review of Books, that when Dawkins in his writing is not thoroughly ignorant of moderate theologians who see no conflict between faith and reason, is so baffled by them that he simply dismisses them, unable to fathom what he could utter to gainsay a word of their perspectives. For Dawkins, there is only athieism on the one hand and theism that is by definition fundamentalism on the other. There is no middle ground.<br /><br />Yet it is these very non-fundamentalist religionists, those liberation theologians, liberal Anglicans, Catholic Workers, the architects of Jubilee 2000, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Tariq Ramadan, the Unitarians, the Quakers, the United Church of Canada, the Jesuit Sandinista ministers who chose the revolution over the church whose faith inspires or inspired them to fight poverty, oppression, war and colonialism, whose work actually helps build the world without injustice, without despair that builds the hope in the hearts of men and women that actually diminishes the need for superstition.<br /><br />Indeed, if we follow this logic, then the Sermon on the Mount, of all things, or rather an adherence to its prescriptions of solidarity, is more likely to deliver the rationalist culture that Dawkins hopes for than a legion of Dawkinses.<br /><br />Dawkins’ explanation for superstition is all opiate of the masses and no heart in a heartless world.Victor Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02227614963664976833noreply@blogger.com28tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7655406.post-13086162448333015352007-02-27T21:27:00.000+01:002007-02-27T21:31:55.668+01:00The exploding package of EU Postal Privatisation<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; text-align: left; line-height: normal;" align="left"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">Article I did on spec for a publication. They didn't want it in the end, but here you go (I warn you - it's a little dull).<br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; text-align: left; line-height: normal;" align="left"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; text-align: left; line-height: normal;" align="left"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">When I was a little boy, every month I would go to the local Canada Post office and get a special envelope with the new commemorative stamps that had recently been issued. My grandparents in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">England</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";"> too would send me British commemorative stamps at Christmas, sometimes at other times, falsely saluting Alexander Graham Bell as the inventor of the telephone or raising the ire of the anti-secularists for printing lickable, perforated squares of snowmen instead of magi or mangers.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; text-align: left; line-height: normal;" align="left"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">As I grew older, philately diminished considerably in my estimation. However, when I was in </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">Madrid</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";"> recently, I wandered down an alley just off the Plaza Mayor, where there is a minor gaggle of stamp shops. I wandered past and saw in a couple of windows not a few stamps and brittle old envelopes with stamps from the era of the </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">Spanish</span></st1:PlaceName><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">Republic</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">. Though 2006 is the 70<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the start of the Spanish Civil War, this was one of the only remembrances I could find in the city of the period. Stamp-collecting has more or less gone the way of the dodo (the extinction of which was, I should note, had been commemorated on one of the stamps I had had as a child) in this age of Playstations and Nickelodeon, and I thought what a shame it was. The socialist thirty-one-year old I am momentarily was a stamp-fanatic eleven-year-old and thought what beautiful little bits of history are held within and taught by these funny sticky squares. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; text-align: left; line-height: normal;" align="left"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">Technology and the proposed new EU postal services directive will soon put paid to stamps and stamp-collecting entirely. The EU FAQ on the directive on the Commission website mentions that after full liberalization it is unlikely that new service providers will retain the anachronism that is the stamp. One can’t mourn the passing of out-dated technologies, I suppose. But the directive will kill off more than the soppy philatelic memories of this nostalgic author. The full privatization of post across </span><st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">Europe</span></st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";"> will produce services that are deeply uneven and unequal. It will produce a grossly unfair two-tiered postal system, with one set of quality services for the large corporations and urban middle class, and another set of poorly provisioned services for rural areas, the urban poor, small businesses and the outermost territories of member states – if they even have access to such services at all. Though the Commission portrays postal privatization as one more aspect of the grand drive to bring Europeans together, it will in fact diminish the economic, social and territorial cohesion of the </span><st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">Union</span></st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">. The death of public postal services after more than three hundred years of their existence is indeed something to mourn. Or rather, as Wobbly Joe Hill reminded his fellow trade unionists as he was dying: not to mourn, but to organize – against.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; text-align: left; line-height: normal;" align="left"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">The EU internal market Commissioner, Irishman Charlie McGreevy, recently confirmed that all European postal services are to be opened to competition by 2009, in keeping with the last postal directive of 2002. Full, or near-full marketisation of post has already occurred in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">Germany</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">, </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">Finland</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">, the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">Netherlands</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">, </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">Sweden</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";"> and the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">UK</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">. With the new directive, the commissioner wants to fast-track liberalization in the remaining 22 member states. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; text-align: left; line-height: normal;" align="left"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">Postal services in the Union are covered by a 1997 directive that opened up the sector to competition for mail weighing more than 350 grams – essentially large packages – easily the most profitable sector of the postal market. Items under 350 grams were designated ‘reserved areas’. In 2002, the reserved area was amended down to 100 grams, and as of January, 2006, no mail delivery of items over 50 grams could be monopolized by a national provider. The Commission has this month confirmed that by no later than 2009 are all member states to eliminate this last reserved area.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; text-align: left; line-height: normal;" align="left"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">McGreevy is quick to counter opponents of the measure by saying that we are not to worry, universal service provision – comprising the ‘affordable’ provision of at least one delivery and collection five days a week to all citizens - is ‘copper-fastened’ into the directive. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; text-align: left; line-height: normal;" align="left"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">In fact, upon the briefest of investigations, one finds that universal service provision is not so much ‘copper-fastened’ into the directive as it is lathered in soap and butter ready to slip through its hands and bounce right out the door into a jungle of free-market rapaciousness.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; text-align: left; line-height: normal;" align="left"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">The language used by the commissioner gives the game away immediately. On the liberalizing side, actions ‘<b style="">should’</b> and ‘<b style="">must’</b> happen. Member states are ‘<b style="">required’</b> to take them. But on the consumer side, language ‘<b style="">provides</b> for the retention of uniform tariffs’ (i.e., the same price for a similar item, regardless of address); it ‘</span><b style=""><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";" lang="EN-GB">allow[s]</span></b><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";" lang="EN-GB"> a flexible choice of means to finance universal service provision or the <b style="">possibility</b> to share out the universal service obligation between operators</span><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; text-align: left; line-height: normal;" align="left"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">But we need not look to the weasel legal language of the directive to see what will happen. We can see the effects of postal privatization in those member states where liberalization has already been completely or nearly completely realized. Closure of rural post offices, mass lay-offs and a flexibilisation of the workforce is the norm in every jurisdiction.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; text-align: left; line-height: normal;" align="left"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">In January this year, </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">Austria</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">’s conservative coalition government agreed to sell of 49 per cent of its shares in Österreichische Post, but the process of privatization has been underway for about a decade. In 1996, the state-owned Austrian Postal Authorities (Österreichische Post- und Telegraphenverwaltung) was refigured as Post und Telekom Austria AGan enterprise based on private company law. It sold off its telecoms and post bus transport services, while simultaneously acquiring a majority stake in Feibra AG, a private distributor of adverts, and has expanded into </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">Slovenia</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";"> and </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">Slovakia</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">. Over this ten-year pre-privatisation period, thousands of workers have been laid off. Between 2001 and 2005, the workforce was cut by 22 per cent, or 6600 employees. The share of part-time hires has doubled and the number of workers coming from temp agencies has skyrocketed. Whereas previously, the company used temp agency workers only at peak times such as Christmas, such practices have been institutionalized. Finally, more than 1000 local post offices (out of a total of 2300) have been closed across </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">Austria</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; text-align: left; line-height: normal;" align="left"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">In </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">Ireland</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">, An Post sold off its SDS Courier service – its most profitable department – as part of a government-directed opening of the market favouring the big courier services such as DHL and Federal Express. The management is softening up the workforce for privatization by withholding pay-rises and understaffing sorting offices. An Post workers feel that this is part of a strategy of weakening employee morale so that there is less internal resistance to the inevitable full privatization. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; text-align: left; line-height: normal;" align="left"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">In the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">UK</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">, where postal privatization is quite advanced, there has been thousands of post office closures, almost entirely in rural areas. Only some 1,500 of 8000 rural post offices are profitable, but the principle behind postal services in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">UK</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";"> for some 350 years has been that the profitable regions subsidise outlying and naturally unprofitable areas, ensuring equal access to services across the country. With the liberalization of the Post Office’s most profitable division, is it any wonder that rural post offices are scheduled for market demolition? As of 1999, the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">UK</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";"> had some 18000 post offices. It now has 14000, and this week is set to announce an expected further 2500-3000.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; text-align: left; line-height: normal;" align="left"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">In </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">Sweden</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";"> the postal workforce declined by ten per cent over the period 1995 to 1999 – from 46,000 to 42,000. In </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">Germany</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">, it dropped a whopping 37 per cent – from 380,000 to 240,000 – over the period 1990<span style=""> </span>to 1999.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; text-align: left; line-height: normal;" align="left"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">The privateers argue that technological change is behind most of this, and this is at least partially true. Some 80 per cent of mail worldwide is now sent via computer. In the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">UK</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";"> that figure is 90 per cent. However, at the same time, parcel post has grown by leaps and bounds. Federal Express is the second largest airline in the world, if measured by size of the fleet. The closure of thousands of rural post offices across the </span><st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">Union</span></st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";"> is a political decision. A neo-liberal fundamentalist decision. It is not driven by technological change.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; text-align: left; line-height: normal;" align="left"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">In the Commission’s own FAQ on what will happen after full liberalization, it states that ‘as a matter of principle, competition creates jobs’. This is true only in a perverse way. In the wake of telecoms liberalization – which is the model to which postal privatization is regularly compared - cost savings to consumers was achieved on the backs of mass lay-offs and outsourcing to temp agencies and developing world call centres. Jobs were created, but poorly paid, ununionised, temporary and part-time ones. Similarly, the private telcos are incredibly reluctant to introduce new technologies to rural and poor areas where they feel the cost of an upgrade of the lines is not worth the revenues they expect from such regions. The cost of a line rental may have dropped across the board, but broadband remains beyond the reach of many in rural areas. Even in urban areas, some telcos have been taken to court for refusing to upgrade lines in apartment complexes that mostly house the elderly or poor, for the same reason. With public service provision, the cost is spread across all regions and levels of income.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; text-align: left; line-height: normal;" align="left"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">The Commission believes that liberalization will result in cost-savings for the consumer. However, the area where money is to be made is in the high-population-density areas where post can be moved in bulk easily. Further, again, in the Commission’s own FAQ, it states that while it is likely that more postal operators will offer services in an open postal market, ‘most operators will be found in the area of business originated mail, which represents close to 90 per cent of total mail volumes. Private consumers are less likely to be able to choose between different postal operators, at least in the short to medium term.’ Elsewhere, in the same document, it states that while the universal service obligation guarantees the affordability of postal services (so it’s gonna be about the same price, but don’t expect any reductions, honey). At the same time, huzzah, ‘prices for business mail are likely to fall very soon after market opening, as most postal companies will focus on this area to begin with.’ Here, they are all but admitting that consumers will not benefit from postal privatization. If postal companies are making their money from business mail, what incentive is there for private service providers to subsidise consumer mail? Any cost-savings they find they will pass on to their most valued customers, not some grandmother in a village in </span><st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">Lapland</span></st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; text-align: left; line-height: normal;" align="left"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">Indeed, the most likely scenario is that private providers will focus on the business and urban mail sectors and leave the rest to the rump incumbent providers. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; text-align: left; line-height: normal;" align="left"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">So if the directive supposedly guarantees universal service provision, how exactly will the market provide? <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; text-align: left; line-height: normal;" align="left"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">The answer is it won’t, as, again, the Commission admits. In order to ensure universal service provision member states ‘may choose’ from a range of different options: state aid (subsidizing private businesses), public procurement, compensation funds or cost-sharing. In other words, recognizing that private providers will be extremely reluctant to provide loss-making services, the Commission has concluded that to continue to ensure universal service provision, governments will still have to pay for it. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; text-align: left; line-height: normal;" align="left"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">Essentially, we are selling the goose that lays the golden egg. While still having to fund universal provision of service, governments will no longer have the subsidy for this service that business-originated and parcel post previously provided.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; text-align: left; line-height: normal;" align="left"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">One might as well ask why move forward with privatization at all, if it is not just a big gift to business, wrapped up in string…<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; text-align: left; line-height: normal;" align="left"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">…but of course without stamps, and don’t even try to send it from your village post office.<o:p></o:p></span></p>Victor Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02227614963664976833noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7655406.post-1155225440409864822006-08-10T17:07:00.000+02:002006-08-10T17:59:12.680+02:00'Murder on an unimaginable scale'<blockquote>'The deputy commissioner at Scotland Yard, Paul Stephenson, went even further, saying that the plans amounted to "mass murder on an unimaginable scale."'</blockquote><br />Murder on an <a href="http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&amp;cid=1155204159545&call_pageid=968332188492&col=968793972154">unimaginable</a> scale? Let's assume for a moment that there was in fact a dastardly terror plot here (I know, I know - that's Tooth Fairy, Father Christmas talk) and not another grand production from Number 10's <a href="http://home.nc.rr.com/tuco/looney/acme/doit.html">Acme Distract-O-Matic</a> , is the number of deaths really so unimaginable?<br /><br />The average number of passengers on an aircraft leaving Stansted is <a href="http://www.stopstanstedexpansion.com/press229.html">124</a>; the average number of passengers on an aircraft leaving Gatwick is <a href="http://www.gov.ie/committees-29/c-publicenterprise/20030702-J/Page1.htm">129</a>; the average number of passengers on an aircraft leaving Heathrow is around <a href="http://www.hacan.org.uk/resources/consultation_responses/hacan.5th_terminal.opening.pdf">150</a>. The average of these three averages is 134 (.333333333...., etc., but there's no such thing as a third of a person - other than under rubble in Qana - ha! Ba-dum-cha!). 134 x 9 - the number of planes supposed to be explodeded - and we get 1206 (please excuse the ropey math here, but you get the point) .<br /><br />As of an hour ago, the body count in (the) Lebanon was 1002. Okay, so it's a smidge under 1206, but it's still on a perfectly imaginable scale. In fact it's so imaginable it's actually real. Really real live dead people! Can you imagine that?!<br /><br />You know, I imagine we'll get to a number pretty close to 1206 in a day or three, and I imagine it'll probably go above that too.<br /><br />What an imagination I have.Victor Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02227614963664976833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7655406.post-1139771741405894362006-02-12T18:18:00.000+01:002006-02-12T20:15:41.470+01:00Amsterdam<p style="font-family: times new roman;" class="MsoNormal">Am in the middle of moving to <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Amsterdam</st1:place></st1:City> for a new job that for once is actually interesting and pay a salary that is above the minimum wage. Will be <i style="">sans</i> internet for about a month while I look for an apartment, so still nothing to report, really, other than more apologies for my continued radio silence. <span style=""> </span></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;" class="MsoNormal">But just quickly and retroactively: </p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;" class="MsoNormal">a) Yah boo sucks to the Tories for winning the Canadian election, but remember, kids, the left also advanced, despite Layton’s pathetic rightward frolics (strategically stupid as well – retreat back to the Anglophone left’s traditional anti-Quebec chauvinism and you wreck any chances of advancing in that province, which must be engaged if one is to ever win a federal election. <a href="http://theproles.blogspot.com/2006/01/canadian-election-results-left-gains.html">Doug</a> has more along these lines.); </p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;" class="MsoNormal">b) Obviously I’m not in favour of burning down Danish embassies over some ropily executed cartoon blasphemy (although burning down American embassies over their various imperial exertions is an entirely different kettle of <i style="">fisken</i>, and, heck, while we’re at it, Haitians: fill your boots ransacking the local Canadian chancellery), but has any one actually had a look at these drawings? Whatever we may say about freedom of speech and blasphemy, the cartoons are manifestly racist, with caricatures of Muslims not radically distinct from the doodles of buck-toothed, thick-specs-wearing Japs or hook-nosed Shylocks of yore (Lenny, as always, has been note-perfect <a href="http://leninology.blogspot.com/2006/02/metastasis-enjoyment.html">on</a> <a href="http://leninology.blogspot.com/2006/02/free-speech-political-correctness-and.html">this</a> <a href="http://leninology.blogspot.com/2006/02/unity-protest.html">one</a>); </p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;" class="MsoNormal">c) My friend Justin of <a href="http://differentday.blogspot.com/">Different Day</a> has decided to have a go at this whole podcasting lark, with ‘The Thousand Beer Show – Pop, politics and pintage’, (so titled for the renowned abundance of the substance in <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Belgium</st1:place></st1:country-region>) and your correspondent was the first invited guest. You can have a listen to my wretched, stumbling pretensions at rock knowledge and an atrociously over-simplified account of the recent Canadian general election <a href="http://1000beers.blogspot.com/">here</a>;</p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;" class="MsoNormal">and</p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;" class="MsoNormal">d) <a href="http://www.husky-rescue.com/">Husky Rescue</a>, <a href="http://www.twogallants.com/">Two Gallants</a> [which I saw opening for the Decemberists long before the NME got their inky little paws on the duo], and <a href="http://www.thekooks.co.uk/">The Kooks</a>.</p>Victor Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02227614963664976833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7655406.post-1138125964229846892006-01-24T18:57:00.000+01:002006-01-24T19:23:30.440+01:00Ten items or less<span style="font-family:times new roman;">Sorry for the writer's block, comrades. Will be back in form soonish, hopefully. In the meantime, here's something I did today instead of doing other things I should have been doing. (Click on image for larger version)</span><br /><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7674/481/1600/fewer%20not%20less%20web.jpg"><img style="CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7674/481/400/fewer%20not%20less%20web.jpg" border="0" /></a></span><br /><br />Visit <a href="http://media.gn.apc.org/disputes/">here </a>for info on the NUJ's Low Pay Campaign.Victor Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02227614963664976833noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7655406.post-1134143192524709702005-12-09T16:44:00.000+01:002005-12-09T18:00:37.500+01:00White Stripes plot with Coca-Cola execs to murder Colombian trade unionists(Well, apart from the libellous hyperbole, that post-heading's essentially true)<br /><br />Now, it may be nigh on a decade since I held Oasis in any esteem whatever, but I'm afraid I have to tip my hat to Noel this week, who in an interview in the latest NME has quite aptly described Jack White, of the well-overrated White Stripes, as looking 'like Zorro on doughnuts' and criticised him for writing a song for a Coca-Cola commercial:<br /><br /><blockquote>'He's supposed to be the poster boy for the alternative way of thinking. Coca-Cola man, fucking hell! And all right, you wanna spread your message of peace and love, but do us all a favour. I'm not having that, that's wrong. Particularly Coca-Cola, it's like doing a gig for McDonalds.' </blockquote><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7674/481/1600/zorro.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7674/481/320/zorro.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">Zorro on doughnuts</span><br /><br />According the (very smelly*) NME, Jack White did it for <a href="http://www.nme.com/news/white-stripes/21410">luuurve</a>:<br /><br /><blockquote>'White Stripes singer Jack White has finally confirmed he's done a coke ad - and said he's done it to get a message of love out to the world…"I've been offered the opportunity to write a song in a way which interests me as a songwriter. I certainly wouldn't want a song that I'd already written to be used on a commercial. That seems strange. But to be asked to write something particular along one theme of love in a worldwide form that I'm not really used to appealed to me. I've written a song and I wrote it really quickly and it's an interesting commercial that's been made. I was inspired by the commercial."' </blockquote><br />Yes, that's right. Coca-cola, always teaching the world to sing, in per-fect har-mon-ieeee (The updated 'Teach the world to sing' ad for <a href="http://www.cocacolazero.com/">Coca-Cola Zero </a>now includes a 'rap' bit and Hootie-and-the-Blowfish-style non-threateningly dressed minorities who look like they go to a good university). What a promoter of peace and love. And isn't what the world needs now, love, sweet love? What a paragon of compassionate capitalism. A very model of corporate responsibility. Except in Colombia, where union leaders and organisers are regularly assassinated at Coke bottling plants while the anti-union parent company turns a blind eye to collusion between paramilitaries and the plant managers. But still, you know, apart from that, they're a regular bunch of hippie peace-freaks, Coke.<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7674/481/1600/killer%20coke.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7674/481/320/killer%20coke.jpg" border="0" /></a>In fact, Colombia happens to be the most dangerous country in the world to be a trade unionist. In the last ten years, 1,535 trade unionists have been murdered for their activities - more than the rest of the world combined. For more info on Coke's crimes in Colombia and how you can kick Coke off your campus (if you're a student, natch), visit the homepage of the <a href="http://www.killercoke.org/">Campaign to Boycott Killer Coke</a>, or the <a href="http://www.colombiaactionnetwork.org/boycott.html">Colombia Action Network</a>. The latter link also has a broad range of information on Colombia, as do the UK-based <a href="http://www.colombiasolidarity.org.uk/">Colombia Solidarity Campaign</a> and <a href="http://www.waronwant.org/?lid=112">War on Want</a>.<br /><br />So stop drinking that Coke. Tastes like <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=gouch">gouch</a> sweat anyway. And White Stripes fans - get your ever-lovin' motor-city asses in gear and contact Zorro, c/o manager Ian Montone, at 323 308 1818, and tell him How Wrong He Is.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />* Has anyone else noticed this, how much the NME smells? I'm serious here - maybe it's just the batch that gets sent to the Brussels Waterstone's - but the NME just reeks. I mean literally pongy, I'm not just talking about the uncritical UK-scene boosterism, shit writing and sticking Gwen Stefani on the cover.<br /><br />PS. <a href="http://www.nme.com/news/blur/21717">Apparently </a>Blur are heading back to the studio this month to record a new album <em>sans</em> the sexiest man alive, Graham Coxon. I guess this means his sacking is permanent. This is a crime almost on the level of writing songs for Coke commercials.Victor Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02227614963664976833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7655406.post-1133885033160340562005-12-06T17:00:00.000+01:002005-12-06T22:17:54.783+01:00The blanching panic of the eunuch poltroons in the Democratic Party, and other bagatellesRight. Am out of bed and have drained throat of a lemon-curd-jar's worth of phlegm. Enough with the chicken soup and dubbed-into-French re-runs of Beverly Hills 90210: There are hypocrisies of social democrats and liberals to expose! Still have a bit of a sticky cough, mind, but think that's more to do with half-choking on a be-pestoed tortellini (tortellino?) last night than any remnants of bird flu or tuberculosis. (Lower lip protruberating, head cocked, sympathetic brows a-tilt, The Reader says 'Awww. Didums.')<br /><br />Quick tour of the interweb before I stick the knife into the SPD once more:<br /><br />First off, if you haven’t read it yet: Sy Hersh's latest New Yorker piece, on where the war is headed next: 'Up In The Air' (republished <a href="http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/112805Y.shtml">here</a> at Truthout). Absolutely vital.<br /><br />The veteran New Yorker journo predicts that under ever-increasing domestic pressure over the war (not least coming from within a Republican party on course to be decimated in next year's congressional elections), but unable to end it without embolding his enemies, Bush will deliver a sizeable and genuine return of troops some time next year while the war continues by other, more destructive means. The on-the-ground troops will be replaced with a massively expanded bombing campaign, such as has not been seen since Vietnam.<br /><br />Bush is to have his cake and eat it too. As the US public is unable to stomach many more deaths of their doughty, skookum tumtum boys and girls (although as ever remain fairly sanguine about a limitless number of Iraqi deaths), Junior will mount another 'Mission Accomplished' style pronouncement, declaring that the war is over (chintzy, garlanded ceremonies have already been scripted of the lowering of Old Glory and the raising of the Iraqi standard over military bases [Whatever did happen to that <a href="http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/94E338BA-2CAF-4267-A9FC-5C425A108CE1.htm">variation</a> on the Israeli flag some clever State Department graphic design intern dreamt up as a new Iraqi drapeau last year, by the way?]), aiming to bequiet the more squishy sympathisers of the anti-war movement and the fretters in his own party, all the while in fact escalating the war by using almost exclusively air power to crush the resistance.<br /><br />The generals, however, are worried this might just make things worse, given that even the most crackerjack sagacious of smart bombs tend to kill many more civilians than trigger-happy, raised-on-X-Box-and-Eminem 17-year-old ground troops, and, like the worm that turned into three worms when you cut it up with your plastic-but-sharp Lion-O Thundercat sword as a cruel pre-pubescent, for every dead civilian at least three new insurgents seem to be created. (Did you catch the subtle 'my-1980's-adolescent-pop-cultural-experience-was-superior-to-your-<br />-overly-kinetic-1990's-version' disdain embedded there within the commentary? Sigh. What happy days they were when Lego came in six colours and Transformers came in metal.)<br /><br />Nota bene: Bush's <a href="http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=148219">'Victory Through Air Power'</a> plans look an awful lot like the humble 'we-can't-just-cut-and-run-so-let's-turn-it-over-to-the-bombardiers' suggestion of the otherwise very good Juan Cole, doesn't it? (The good professor <a href="http://www.juancole.com/2005/11/us-air-power-to-replace-infantry-in.html">responds</a> that he 'argued that the US should only make this airstrike capability available for defensive operations.' Okay, but isn't the point of the disingenuous 'Pottery Barn' position that the States can't pull out its forces lest civil war break out? How does one defensively prevent civil war? It seems a pretty offensive, or at least pro-active process. Sy's got you here, Cole-y. [The other point that Cole misses, as he idealises the Afghan campaign's air power strategy he recommends returning to, is that the decisive stratagem in that theatre there was not the air power support of local forces, but the winning over of warlords and sections of the Taliban with wadges of cash. There's nobody on the ground to bribe in Mesopotamia. Oh, and dude, what's with the forgetting about, like, the minimum <a href="http://www.cursor.org/stories/civilian_deaths.htm">3,000 - 4,000 civilian deaths</a> from aerial bombardment in Afghanistan anyway?])<br /><br />***<br /><br />A good bookend piece to Hersh's feature is Alexander Cockburn's <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn12032005.html">'Revolt of the Generals</a>', over at Counterpunch, which details the rapidly declining fortunes of Bush and the Republicans ('One has to go back to the early 1970's when a scandal-stained Nixon was on the verge of resignation, to find numbers lower than Bush's,' says he), but also the blanching panic of those eunuch poltroons in the Democratic Party (including that skinny, empty-vessel darling of the 'Democratic wing of the Democratic Party', Barak Obama, and even the anti-war-esque former boy-mayor of Cleveland, Dennis Kucinich) in the wake of John Murtha's call for immediate withdrawal from Iraq. However grim the Republicans' fortunes, the jellyfish Dems are entirely incapable of capitalising on the situation.<br /><br />***<br /><br />Hitchens fans, and God knows I'm one, ha ha, will adore my internautical comrade <a href="http://leninology.blogspot.com/">Lenin's</a> superb exegesis of the '<a href="http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/seymour261105.html">genocidal imagination</a>' of dear Chris H. over at MRZine, writing under his slightly more pedestrian real name.<br /><br />***<br /><br />I emerged from my sweaty bed the other day to discover to my surprise that my native land (that would be Canada, comrades, despite the regularity with which I am partially mistakenly categorised as a <em>Britischer</em> in various nationally dichotomised blogrolls) is having another election. I was so off the ball that I missed the entire first week's campaign. See, this is what happens when the Globe and Mail starts charging for content. <em>De toute façon</em>, it seems the pro-war, pro-imperialism-lite Michael 'I-say-"we"-when-I-talk-about-Americans-but-am-actually-Canadian' Ignatieff has been parachuted into a Toronto riding (trans: 'constituency') with the aim of stirring up such a wave of Trudeaumaniacal sentimentalist desire for an intellectual leader of the Liberal Party that he will be able to surf straight into the PMO. Unluckily for him, the sizeable local Ukrainian community is a little humpty about the riding association's semi-non-democratic shenanigans that produced the candidacy of the former Harvard academic and (continuing) apologist for war crimes, somewhat diminishing his prime ministerial and possibly even MP prospects. Rick Salutin has a piquant little <a href="http://www.rabble.ca/columnists_full.shtml?x=44533">biography</a> of the man at Rabble.ca. Michael Neumann's 2003 <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/neumann12082003.html">piece</a> on Iggy in Counterpunch is also worth a butcher's.<br /><br />***<br /><br />For my Canadian readers, let me just mention briefly for the record that I never did like <a href="http://a123.g.akamai.net/f/123/12465/1d/media.canada.com/cp/national/20051202/n120232a.jpg">Buzz Hargrove</a>.<br /><br />***<br /><br />Meanwhile, my pathetically perpetually approval-seeking homeland is also very excited that Jon Stewart <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20051130.weldailysho1130/BNStory/Front">mentioned</a> the country briefly on the Daily Show.<br /><br />I am occasionally <a href="http://apostatewindbag.blogspot.com/2005/01/dynamite-walls.html">homesick</a>, but not at times like this.<br /><br />***<br /><br />Oh, and Backword Dave <a href="http://backword.me.uk/2005/November/moredoctor.html">has </a>Doctor Who filming by his house. Dude. How awesome is that?!Victor Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02227614963664976833noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7655406.post-1132655666446598662005-11-22T11:30:00.000+01:002005-11-22T11:34:26.456+01:00ExtenuationAm feeling as rough as an old badger, hence little in the way of posting. Do not expect any for a couple of days.<br /><br /><p><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7674/481/1600/badger.0.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7674/481/200/badger.0.jpg" border="0" /></a></p><p> </p><p><span style="font-size:78%;"></span> </p><p><span style="font-size:78%;"></span> </p><p><span style="font-size:78%;"></span> </p><p><span style="font-size:78%;">A young badger. Couldn't find a picture of an old one.</span></p>Victor Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02227614963664976833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7655406.post-1132347005670424082005-11-18T21:40:00.000+01:002005-11-18T23:16:06.876+01:00Peretz a 'Breakthrough' for the Israeli left?In the struggle for justice for Palestine, the left outside Israel so rarely pays attention to economic or political dynamics within Israel proper, outside of how such things might affect the occupied territories. Why concern oneself, too many ask, with the internal processes of the occupier-oppressor when helicopter gunships set elementary schools ablaze and extra-judicial targeted assassinations slaughter bystanders, while the settlements continue to expand on the West Bank and the serpentine Separation Wall meanders through Palestinian land, carving out yet more acreage for Eretz Israel?<br /><br />But this is a wilfully purblind ignorance, and a perspective as absurd as suggesting that because there is little difference between Democrats and Republicans, there is nothing of interest to the global left in American electoral contests. It is not enough to simply say that there is no genuine electoral left in the United States and dismissively leave it at that. One must ask why this is so. Equally, it is not enough to ask 'What has the Israeli left ever done for the Palestinians?' One must ask why they have done nothing.<br /><br />In the last week, there has been a political earthquake within the ranks of the Israeli Labor Party: A giant has been felled. How this development may or may not affect the occupation is reason enough to pay attention to internal Israeli phenomena.<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7674/481/1600/peretz.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7674/481/200/peretz.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">New Israeli Labor Party leader Tom Selleck.</span><br /><br />Whenever one visits an Israeli newspaper website such as <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/">Ha'aretz</a>, one is struck by the number of ads for anti-poverty charities. This is no mere shilling for money for the settlements - or at least some of it isn't. While the world's attention has been rightly focussed on the war crimes committed in the occupied territories, Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister initiated a programme of structural adjustment within Israel every bit as vicious as those of his models, Thatcher and Reagan in the UK and US. The economic liberalisation, steady reduction in social service provision and diminishment of trade union rights continued under Barak and has rapidly expanded under Sharon, whose finance minister is, of course, Netanyahu. The cutbacks to social services have all gone to the country's massive defence budget and funding the settlements. This liberalisation has not gone without consequence. The number of poor families in the country increased by 20.3 per cent in 2004 alone, with one in three Israeli children now living in poverty. Poverty has flourished to such an extent that the gap between rich and poor in Israel is now actually greater than in any other developed country - hence all the charity ads.<br /><br />The occupation is not merely ruinous to Palestinians; It is also literally consuming Israeli society itself.<br /><br />[By the way, I don't think visiting a website counts as breaking the boycott - surely one has to be informed in order to offer solidarity to the Palestinians. That said, this whole boycott business is a bit of a fuzzy thing at the edges. Live herbs and helva have been pretty easy for me to avoid (In any case, I manage to kill basil plants with the ease and impunity that the IDF kills eleven-year-olds, so it's all probably for the best), but when I was in Amsterdam last weekend, I accidentally bought a falafel that turned out to be dripping with Palestinian blood. Scarfing down the yummy thing, my German friend, Jens, and my Palestinian friend, Osama, both said more or less at the same time, 'You realise that's an Israeli falafel?', and I responded, 'Mmo, muh-uh. Ifs noff. Ifs mutch.' To which Jens rebutted, 'No, Maoz Falafel's definitely not Dutch, it's Israeli.' To which I rejoindered, 'Oo fwure? Hmm. Oh weh, ifs wery masty.' The next day I looked Maoz up on the old interweb and it turns out it is a Dutch company, just owned by expat Israelis. So <em>ner</em>, thought I. That doesn't count. But then I read that the actual falafel it uses, on the other hand, is not terribly Netherlandish. It's a complicated business, as I said. It reminds me of my days as a teenage vegetarian, when I was morally torn upon finding out that most beer was filtered using edible gelatines, which is made from animal bones, or <em>isinglass</em>, which is made from fish bladders. I gave up vegetarianism some time shortly thereafter. I was not a terribly good vegetarian anyway, what with the regular 'bacon breaks' I allowed myself from time to time. (NB., vegan readers: Most bottled bitters and lagers are O.K., but Guinness? Not vegan!)]<br /><br />All this has only exacerbated the plight of Mizrahi, or 'Eastern' Jews (immigrants from other Middle Eastern and north African countries), who since their first arrival in the 1950's have been viewed in much the same way within Israel by the Ashkenazi (those from Europe and their descendents) elite as Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and north Africa are in Europe. Most Easterners are trapped on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder and many live below the poverty line. According to veteran Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery, the Eastern Jews are overrepresented in Israeli prisons. Of course one shouldn't take the analogy too far, and the poverty that exists in the Mizrahi neighbourhoods doesn't compare to that of the occupied territories and, one hardly need add, there are no helicopter gunships, but Israel has its own <em>Jewish</em> banlieues, if you will.<br /><br />On the <a href="http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1131836524/">Gush Shalom</a> site this week, Avnery <a href="http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1131836524/">tells</a> of the sort of welcome that greeted the Mizrahi immigrants in the 1950s:<br /><blockquote>'From generation to generation, a (true) story was passed on about the Moroccan immigrants who were driven to a place in the middle of the desert and told to build a new town for themselves. When they refused to get out of the truck, its tipping mechanism was activated and they were literally "poured" out, as if they were a load of sand.</blockquote><br />This racism that divides Israel in two has only intensified since then:<br /><blockquote>'[T]he Ashkenazi ruling class openly despises the Arab manners, diction and music that the Eastern immigrants brought with them. This overtly racist attitude towards the Arabs became a covert racist attitude towards the Eastern Jews. These reacted defensively by adopting an extreme anti-Arab attitude.'</blockquote><br />Labor (and its forerunner, Mapai) dominated Israeli politics from long before the founding of the state of Israel until the 1970s. To this day, while Likud governs, Labor is seen as the party of the establishment. Likud exploited this sense of alienation felt by non-Ashkenazi Israelis to break the lock Labor had in power, by reaching out to the Mizrahim in the late seventies and eighties.<br /><br />In a pattern we see everywhere else - from the poor American south to those unemployed whites living two doors down from a mosque in a French or German suburb, where those just one step above the lowest of the low often support not the left, but the hard right - Eastern Jews do not vote Labor; they vote Likud. They do not support the peace camp. They do not go to peace rallies. Few of them attended the 200,000 strong rally in Tel Aviv on Saturday in commemoration of assassinated Labor Prime Minister Yitshak Rabin. To the Eastern Israelis, the peace camp is the preserve of the wealthy, Ashkenazi Tel Aviv elite. Why does Labor care so much about the Arabs, they demand, and not the poorest of Israelis?<br /><br />As Sharon's aide-de-camp, Shimon Peres has not only backed unilateral disengagement, the rapid expansion of the settlements on the West Bank and the Separation Wall's annexation of still more Palestinian land, he has also fully backed Likud's structural adjustment. You couldn't fit a Kleenex between the economic policies of Peres and the right of the Labor Party and Sharon and Netanyahu. So when we ask why there is not much of an Israeli left - or at least one that has done anything for the Palestinians, we must understand that the foundation of any left anywhere - the working class - in Israel for the most part is tied at the hip to Likud.<br /><br />Which is why the toppling of Peres as leader of the Labor Party by Amir Peretz this week is so profound.<br /><br />Peretz, which, as Avnery has pointed out, means 'breakthrough' in Hebrew, is a Mizrahi Jew from Morroco and also the head of the Histradrut, the Israeli trade union. Domestically described in similar terms to UK trade unionism's 'Awkward Squad', Peretz's leadership of the union has orchestrated regular general strikes, holding the union's own against Netanyahu both as PM and as finance minister. The first Mizrahi Israeli to head the Labor Party, Peretz won above all because he opposes neo-liberalism in Israel. He wants to push Labor back to the left economically and promises to raise the minimum wage, end the cutbacks, increase spending on social spending and focus on the plight of the huge numbers of Israelis who are living in poverty.<br /><br />Mizrahi Israelis voted en masse for Peretz in the party's leadership primaries, while Perez won the backing of the wealthier, largely Ashkenazi Labor elite. As a Mizrahi himself, a left-wing trade unionist campaigning on a traditional social democratic platform, he has the potential to knock the Mizrahi pillars of support out from underneath Likud.<br /><br />Peretz also calls for an end to the occupation and Sharon's unilateralism. He wants to return to negotiations and a final settlement with the Palestinians. Indeed, he has called for a Palestinian state for twenty years - since long before such a call was politically acceptable in Israel. And most importantly, he makes the connection between the occupation and poverty in Israel. If there weren't settlements, if there weren't an occupation, Israel's poor would not be so. The money for the settlements should instead to go to social programmes and poverty reduction, he says.<br /><br />Opposed to Labor's support for Likud, he is to pull his party out of the coalition government, forcing new elections early next year. Were Labor to win that election, he would be the first non-Ashkenazi Prime Minister of Israel.<br /><br />Naturally, Israel's bosses have reacted in horror to Peretz's unexpected victory. On the weekend, the Manufacturers Association of Israel and the Federation of Israeli Chambers of Commerce attacked Peretz's economic proposals, in particular his call for a raise in the minimum wage.<br /><br />Voters, however are much more receptive to his ideas. According to a Ha'aretz poll, if Knesset elections were held today, the Labor Party headed by Peretz would have increase its power significantly, winning 28 mandates - up from its current 21 - to Likud's 39. Also, a majority of the Israeli public believes Peretz's victory in the Labor primaries increased the party's chances to regain power, and for the first time in a long time, 82 per cent of traditional Labor voters say they will consider voting for their party again. Nonetheless, as interesting as this for all represents in terms of movement within the Israeli polity, we must analyse this event realistically, and not with through the rose-coloured gas mask goggles the Zionist left is.<br /><br />Although the party's chances will only increase from the predicted 28 now that he has won the Labor leadership, 28 is still quite far from being able to form government. Sharon, having been able to associate the country's economic reforms more with his finance minister, and remaining enormously popular for disengagement, would still win, whether as head of Likud or heading up his own party he would almost certainly form if Netanyahu manages to successfully challenge him for the leadership. This party is all but certain to win, and, having lost the next election, Peretz will be disposed of just as quickly as its last leader, Amram Mitzna, who upon his election was also hailed as the peace candidate.<br /><br />Secondly, the rest of the Labor establishment remain in power and are working to undermine their new leader. All the Labor Party government ministers and most of the party's MKs did not vote for Peretz. They have described his victory as 'traumatic', as shocking as losing to Netanyahu in 1996, that he has stolen 'their' party from them in a hostile takeover, and some people somewhere have already begun to whisper about problems with Peretz's voter registration.<br /><br />If Sharon leaves Likud to form his own party, Peres will almost certainly join him there, splitting the Labor party. (Ha'aretz <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/644345.html">jokes</a>, what then would Peretz's rump Labor party be called? 'New Labor'?)<br /><br />Furthermore, for all the noise about Peretz's commitment to social democracy, his candidacy was a well-oiled machine, co-ordinated by industrialist Benny Gaon, high-tech millionaire Ofer Kornfeld and Guy Spiegelman, another high-tech businessman and the head of the Labor Party academic forum. Futhermore, while described as a firebrand union leader, in recent years he has moderated his stance, presumably with his parliamentary career in mind.<br /><br />In 1999, he resigned from the Labor Party to form his own party, Am Ehad ('One Nation'). Though he was as much of a social democrat then as he is now, the party won just two mandates in the Knesset that year and three in 2003, and ultimately merged back with Labor last year (ironically following a courtship by Peres, who thought Peretz would protect him against Barak). However popular he is with the Israeli working class, in the two parliamentary tests of this popularity so far, he has been unable to translate it into power.<br /><br />But, above all, it was not Likud that initiated the occupation, but Labor.<br /><br />The occupation is Labor's occupation.<br /><br />In 1974, Labour established the first settlement in the West Bank.<br /><br />Peres and assassinated soi-disant peacenik Yitzhak Rabin supported Menachim Begin and Sharon's 1982 invasion of Lebanon.<br /><br />Rabin and Peres never established the safe passages between the West Bank and Gaza promised as part of Oslo, and continued the settlement programme.<br /><br />Contrary to popular myth, at Camp David, it was not Arafat who walked away from Barak's 'generous' offer of a Palestinian Bantustan, but Barak who walked away from the idea of honourable negotiations that would give Arafat something he could take back to his people.<br /><br />Even those to further left equivocate: the Meretz Party (now <a href="http://www.yachadparty.org.il/">Yachad</a>), the democratic socialists to the left of both Labor and Am Ehad, who hold six seats in the Knesset and are supposedly the party of a just peace with the Palestinians, participated in the 92-96 Rabin (Peres) and later Barak coalition governments - all the while settlements were expanding. Meretz itself is split over the Separation Wall, with half the party approving of its unilateral annexation of Palestinian land. The party is also split over the IDF's actions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with the so-called 'Securitist Zionist' faction regarding them as legitimate counter-terror operations, while the radicals in the party oppose the actions as 'illegal and immoral. The party also officially denounces the Refuseniks' refusal to serve in the Israeli military (although, to be fair - the party really is divided over this. While it denounces refusal to serve, the party's US affiliate <a href="http://www.meretzusa.org/linkspage.shtml">website</a> links to <a href="http://www.seruv.org.il/defaulteng.asp">Courage to Refuse</a> ['Ometz Lesarev'], the Refusenik organisation, and the radicals organise support for them and a number of Refuseniks are active at a number of levels in Meretz).<br /><br />Only the far left, anti-Zionist <a href="http://www.hadash.org.il/english.html">Hadash</a> party, which currently has three seats in the Knesset, is consistent in its support for Palestinian rights.<br /><br />But ultimately, the Palestinians do not need to wait for the Israeli left to join their struggle, any more than South Africa's blacks had to wait for the Afrikaaner working class to join theirs. However much it can't hurt to have an Israeli left on side, the Palestinians will struggle on and one day win, with or without one.Victor Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02227614963664976833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7655406.post-1132170880339859852005-11-16T20:49:00.000+01:002005-11-16T20:55:21.670+01:00Sarko steals Le Pen's thunder - to some extentGreat news! The Front National rally the other night was shit!<br /><br />According to the <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4440408.stm">BBC</a>, 'only a few hundred die-hard supporters braved the cold to wave their flags and listen as [Jean-Marie Le Pen] blamed "mad and criminal" mass immigration for the unrest.'<br /><br />Sadly, at the same time, his popularity has jumped by five per cent, according to a poll for Paris Match.Victor Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02227614963664976833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7655406.post-1131984269189503412005-11-14T17:00:00.000+01:002005-11-14T18:12:32.183+01:00Things fall apart.It really is Bizarro World. John Simpson has written <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4419430.stm">another</a> very astute analysis.<br /><br />Writing on how the curfews have only created the illusion of containing the violence, with in any case the unrest continuing beyond the capital city, Simpson notes that the very measures being used to contain the violence is itself exacerbating the situation and creating yet more reasons for the young people to fight:<br /><br /><blockquote><p>'A woman of 24, heavily pregnant, came to the courtroom to find journalists who would be interested in watching a video she had made of the police coming to her flat to arrest her husband. </p><p>'In fact he had been on night-shift, and not out in the streets at all - but the video showed how aggressive the police were, and there are dozens of accounts going the rounds of the police shouting at the demonstrators that they are "sales arabes", dirty Arabs.<br /><br />'The mother of one prisoner told me that the policeman who arrested her son had shouted that the boy ought to be sent home. "What home does he have but France?" she asked, tearfully.'<br /></p></blockquote><br />I quit my tech news job last month to go freelance. In order to help make the transition, I've been teaching English at a local community college for students learning to be fine-dining waiters and waitresses. They are all immigrants ranging in age from 19 to mid-forties from north and west Africa, apart from one pupil from Ecuador and another who is a rather louche middle-aged Cuban defector. Today, I used a simplified news report about the riots from the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/newsenglish/witn/2005/11/051109_frenchriots.shtml">BBC World Service's Learning English site</a> to spark off some conversation practice. Without offering up my own opinion, they all suddenly came alive, attentive as I've never seen them before - especially the younger ones - responding that the French youths 'ont raison' - they are right. The anti-immigrant racism, the police harassment, the unemployment - it's not much better here, they said. One older man from Morocco said that if he were younger and living in France, he too would be rioting.<br /><br />Separately, I also teach advanced English to a pair of white, middle-aged businesswomen - one a Fleming, the other a Walloon. I somehow think they would respond differently to the exercise.<br /><br />Indeed, according to Le Journal du Dimanche, sadly, some 53 per cent of the French people support the actions of Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister. Here in Belgium, the far-right Vlaams Belang (formerly the Vlaams Blok) has managed to climb to the top of the electoral heap in Flanders in particular by exploiting similar fears over immigrants.<br /><br />Most of my friends here in Belgium are actually from France. The other night I asked my friends Camille and Nico (who in some respects actually resembles the French interior minister, and so is regularly taunted as 'Nicolas Sarkozy' by his media-sponge of an eight-year-old little sister), both of whom are quite exemplary of the anti-neo-liberal mood of much of young France, what they thought of the émeutes. Both of them were quite clear that Sarkozy is a pompier pyromane, a 'pyromaniac fireman': he knew exactly what he was saying and what would happen when he described the rioting youth as 'racailles', and promising to 'karcherise' the suburbs. This is all part of his grand strategy for the 2007 Presidential Election, say my friends, making a play both for working class whites with a soft sort of racism and who are most concerned about 'l'insecurité', and in particular that fifth of the population that votes for the Front National. Nico believes that because Sarkozy is so admired by the far right for his zero-tolerance approach to crime and immigrants, that there need not be any far right participation in the upcoming presidential elections. If Sarkozy is the right's candidate, you already have your fascist to vote for, says he.<br /><br />I think he exaggerates somewhat. Sarkozy is no fascist; he just is being very savvy about courting the far right vote. As Doug Ireland has written, for Sarkozy to apply the term Karcherise 'to young human beings and proffer it as a strategy is a verbally fascist insult and, as a policy proposed by an Interior Minister, is about as close as one can get to hollering "ethnic cleansing" without actually saying so.' Nonetheless, his popularity will be read by other right-wing pols throughout Europe and further afield as a practicable strategy for electoral success.<br /><br />Furthermore, Le Pen knows Sarkozy is off poaching FN supporters, and isn't about to let all the political dividends from the riots accrue solely to the UMP's right wing. The old fascist has organised a rally against immigration and the riots this evening.<br /><br />The LCR held a march two nights ago in Paris between Saint-Michel and Saint-Germain-des-Près. The group called the some <a href="http://www.lcr-rouge.org/IMG/jpg/manif121105.jpg">1,000 to 1,500</a> who demonstrated against the declaration of the state of emergency, 'a success for a rally called at such short notice'.<br /><br />Sadly, Le Pen's rally tonight will likely be much larger, though it too has been called at short notice.<br /><br />The centre cannot hold, etc., etc.<br /><br />***<br /><br />V. good <a href="http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,384092,00.html">interview </a>with Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the Franco-German 'indésirable' soixante-huitard street-fighter turned Green MEP in Der Spiegel. He may have been in favour of the European Constitution, but he hits all the right notes when it comes to the French riots.<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7674/481/1600/cohnbendit.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 161px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 206px" height="206" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7674/481/320/cohnbendit.jpg" width="176" border="0" /></a>Victor Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02227614963664976833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7655406.post-1131905812481207202005-11-13T18:58:00.000+01:002005-11-13T19:19:00.446+01:00Covering riots, Economist magazine reporter somehow accidentally transported to Bizarro World, not FranceSensibly deciding to steer clear of the maniacal Islamofascism-obsessive explanation for the French riots of Steyn, Pipes and Hitchens, the Economist nevertheless <a href="http://www.economist.com/agenda/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5138990">once more</a> hasn't missed an opportunity to argue for greater labour market deregulation and attack the free and democratic association of workers, otherwise known as trade unions. For the libertarian pointy-heads at the magazine, the rebellion is obviously the natural result of France's thirty-five hour working week, job protection laws, high minimum wage and bolshy unions.<br /><br />Er...<em>Whatchutalkinboutwillis?</em><br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7674/481/1600/coleman.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7674/481/320/coleman.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">Arnold finds the Economist's reasoning somewhat specious.</span><br /><br />I swear, if the Economist did an investigation into why my roommate always leaves a consumated roll of toilet paper in the toilet without changing it, they would conclude that it all boils down to the continued existence of a public monopoly on meat inspection in Wales. Got athlete's foot from the gym changing room? Its due to over-regulation of the Danish toy industry. Egg with no yolk? Well, if Catalonia didn't subsidise access to museums for students and seniors… An asteroid headed for Earth to destroy life as we know it? Plainly it's the fault of Corsican pay-roll taxes. Invasion of lizard-men from one of Saturn's moons? Public funding of New Zealand's national opera company. The Rapture and the subsequent thousand-year reign of Satan? Swiss air traffic control unions.<br /><br />The magazine - sorry - 'newspaper' - does recognise that in the suburbs there is a 'toxic mix of poor housing, bad schools, inadequate transport, social exclusion, [and] disaffection among Muslims who are discriminated against,' and the main problem is, 'above all, mass unemployment'. And this is indeed absolutely correct - the country's official youth unemployment rate is 23 per cent and in the suburbs climbs to 40 per cent, and 70 per cent of all new contracts are only temporary, according to Prime Minister de Villepin himself, with 80 per cent of new contracts for young people being temporary.<br /><br />However, for the Economist's journalists, this mass un- and underemployment is not a product of economic sabotage on the part of very profitable French capital, which is, like its German cousin, attempting to discipline both government and electorate into a still-further deregulated business environment. No, for them, the problem is that 'the French labour market is throttled by restrictions such as the 35-hour week, a high minimum wage, and tough hiring and firing rules,' or, 'what economists call an "insider-outsider" labour market: full-time permanent jobs are so protected by law that employers try not to create many, preferring instead temporary workers or interns whom they can shed more easily when times get tough.'<br /><br />'This suits the insiders,' continues the article, ' particularly those on sheltered public-sector contracts. But this leaves a whole swathe of youngsters with the very sensation of insecurity that the social system is designed to prevent.'<br /><br />Thus in the Economist's Bizarro World (the upside-down backwards world from the pages of Superman where everything is the opposite of what it is on Earth, where up is down, ugliness is beautiful and alarm clocks dictate when to go to sleep), it's not the beatific corporations' fault for preferring short-term, part-time, ill-paying contracts and interns, but the avaricious full-time permanent employees and powerful unions, selfishly fearful that they too will be thrown on the scrap heap, who are to blame.<br /><br />There has been much vilification of the country's 35-hour-working-week law, when in fact, between 1995 and 2003, France actually increased its work hours, if only marginally, according to the OECD, <em>despite</em> the existence of the law. Furthermore, French workers are some of the most productive in the world, ahead of Britain, Germany, the United States and Japan, according to the European statistics agency, Eurostat.<br /><br />The danger here in all this is that the Economist's conclusion will also be that of France and, more broadly, of the European Union, when it comes to any post-riot consensus. Already, prior to the riots, the UK Presidency of the Union was pushing the Anglo-Saxon model hard, given its 'record levels of employment'. In the wake of the violence, such a model will look even more attractive.<br /><br />However, the low unemployment rates in the UK and US have not resulted in riotless Shangri-Las of social peace. They are the product of an explosion in McJobs, well exposed by American journalist Barbara Ehrenreich in her bestseller, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0805063897/ref=wl_it_dp/103-7540096-0354241?_encoding=UTF8&coliid=IPQ11CPLDFFOH&v=glance&colid=36Z95ILA6MTBL">Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America</a>, and exactly the sort of short-term, low-pay, part-time positions the Economist pretends to be so concerned about in France. America's middle class is fast disappearing as the McJob dynamic colonises even traditional middle-class white collar jobs, a phenomenon that Ehrenreich has also now written about, in her latest book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0805076069/ref=wl_it_dp/103-7540096-0354241?_encoding=UTF8&coliid=I1H3MEYV1XBS47&v=glance&colid=36Z95ILA6MTBL">Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream</a>. Precarity is the order of the day even for well-educated citizens. It is this very deregulation which causes the creation of McJobs, as it has been in France. Other countries are as much of a tinderbox as France is.<br /><br />The republic needs more job protection, not less.<br /><br />***<br /><br />Oh, and one quick note on the riots that seems to have been underreported: The rioting has involved poor whites <a href="http://www.rte.ie/news/2005/1108/france.html?rss">as well</a>, though admittedly not in the same numbers as those from north or west Africa.Victor Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02227614963664976833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7655406.post-1131804261972488492005-11-12T14:55:00.000+01:002005-11-14T14:11:02.876+01:00Hitchens' Kurdish Jeep Revisionism<strong>Correction:</strong> In the <a href="http://apostatewindbag.blogspot.com/2005/11/hitchens-reactionary-sine-macula.html">last </a>piece, I mentioned that everyone, both critics and admirers of Hitchens, have accepted at face value Christopher's Kurdish Jeep Revisionism. This is not completely true, as Dennis Perrin, a friend of Hitch's and author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/038097732X/103-7540096-0354241?v=glance&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v=glance">American Fan</a>, has written in to say. Dennis has written about the mythical Jeep episode a number of times. From his blog, <a href="http://redstateson.blogspot.com/2005/06/punchy.html">Red State Son</a>:<br /><blockquote>'He may have been in a Kurdish jeep, but the [story about his conversion therein] is a complete lie, and Hitchens knows this. I spent time with him in the period he mentions, and he never stopped criticizing Bush's "mad contest" with Saddam, much less opined that "co-existence" with Saddam was "no longer possible." I have a tape of him debating Ken Adelman on C-SPAN in 1993 where he's still critical of the Gulf War, and again no mention of wanting to overthrow Saddam. As late as 2002, when I asked him directly if he did indeed favor a US invasion, he waffled and said that W. would have to convince him on "about a zillion fronts" before he could sign on.<br /><br />'But that wouldn't make for good drama, nor would it bolster his public image as Stout Warrior. So he tells the above tale, and does so without shame. When I first heard him do this on Don Imus's radio show (Hitchens is no racist but he has no problem using one for exposure), I emailed him and reminded him of his history. He didn't deny it, said that perhaps his memory wasn't as sharp as he would like, but in the end it didn't matter. Who cares what he said in 1993 or 2002 -- this is what he's saying now and if I didn't like it, tough.' </blockquote>Also worth reading, if you haven't yet, Dennis' 2003 <a href="http://citypages.com/databank/24/1179/article11370.asp">obituary </a>for Hitchens, which appeared in the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages, which is far better than Alexander Cockburns' sometimes-bordering-on-homophobic attacks on Hitchens, and expresses very well the disappointment rather than the anger many of us feel who once were fans of Hitchens . As another of Hitchens' former friends and Buffy the Vampire Slayer analyst, Roz Kaveney, <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/rozk/23897.html">puts </a>it,<br /><blockquote>'There is that exchange in Buffy 6.6 where Dawn says "This is going to be one of those things where you are not angry, just very disappointed" and Giles says "Yes, except for the not being angry part."</blockquote>I was never a Buffy fan, but that about sums up my feelings towards the once great writer.<br /><br />Oh, and do go have a read of Roz's captivating remembrance of her days with Hitch at Oxford. He may these days prefer the company of those campaigning against the militant homosexualist agenda, but as a young buck he had a rather different prediliction.<br /><br />***<br /><br /><strong>Update:</strong> It seems it's just a right-old salmagundi of hypocrisy and double-standards for Hitchens these days, <em>le pauvre</em>.<br /><br />Jonathan at <a href="http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/000693.html">A Tiny Revolution</a> apparently did a comedy double-take when watching that somewhat oldish Hitch documentary of his book, <em>The Trial of Henry Kissenger</em>, saying, 'Hold on a sec, lemme just rewind that bit...That's not...why, why, yes it <em>is</em> the International Action Center Christopher is chatting quite, quite friendlily with at an anti-Kissinger protest. But, but I thought he didn't like them very much...'Victor Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02227614963664976833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7655406.post-1131731074990035012005-11-11T18:18:00.000+01:002005-11-14T13:51:53.576+01:00Hitchens: Reactionary, sine macula<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7674/481/1600/hitchSmall.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7674/481/320/hitchSmall.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br />One supposes that if Hitch was willing to <a href="http://www.whorecull.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=40&Itemid=41">prostitute </a>himself to wealthy hard-right Republican anglophile weirdoes for a tour of London along with fellow-former-leftist-turned-right-wing-wackjob David Horowitz (in which guests would have accompanied Hitch & Horowitz around the Houses of Parliament, the Tower of London [to see the bleeding crown jewels!] and other <em>Olde Englande</em> landmarks, had the event not been mysteriously cancelled), and is now regularly writing for Bill Kristol's neo-con and Christian right publication, the Weekly Standard, it really shouldn't surprise anyone that if anything remains of his leftist conscience, it certainly isn't needled by an appearance on conservative cougar Laura Ingraham's radio programme.<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7674/481/1600/cougar.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7674/481/320/cougar.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">Laura Ingraham</span><br /><br />However, for all his confidence in the anti-fascist, liberatory power of white phosphorus, cluster bombs, torture and anal rape with toilet plungers, one assumes that as a confirmed soixante-huitard, he could never descend so far as turning his back on anti-racism.<br /><br />Such an assumption would be wrong. While even <a href="http://marccooper.com/paris-burning/">Marc Cooper </a>and <a href="http://www.whorecull.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=40&Itemid=41">David Aaronovitch</a> (and also, actually, an oddly remarkably lucid <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4414442.stm">John Simpson</a>) are quite clear about the racial and economic 'root causes' of the French <em>émeutes des banlieues</em>, Hitch remains more akin to the <a href="http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn06.html">Mark Steyn</a>/<a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/article/3113">Daniel Pipes</a> 'this is what you get if you let the darkies in' perspective: Via <a href="http://leninology.blogspot.com/2005/11/christopher-hitchens-bad-language.html">Lenny</a> and <a href="http://christopherhitchenswatch.blogspot.com/2005/11/new-low.html">Sonic</a> at Hitch Watch, we find that Johnny Walker Black Label's best customer told Harpee Ingraham two days ago, '<strong>If you think that the Intifada in France is about housing, go and try covering the story wearing a yarmulke.</strong>'<br /><br />Although, frankly, it's not entirely dissimilar to what he said about the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina having had nothing to do with race during the 'Grapple in the Big Apple' with Galloway in NY, to the shocked gasps of even those audience members who'd turned out to support him.<br /><br />But wait - hold on to your fork, there's more. <a href="http://christopherhitchenswatch.blogspot.com/2005/11/wtf.html">Sonic </a>is also reporting that ultra-secularist Hitchens gave the Witherspoon Lecture this month at the Christian fundamentalist, pro-theocracy <a href="http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=CU05K11">Family Research Council</a>.<br /><br />Here is a piccy of him looking beardy and surrounded by virgins:<br /><br /><p align="left"><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7674/481/1600/hitchens%20family%20research%20council.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7674/481/320/hitchens%20family%20research%20council.jpg" border="0" /></a></p><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />And here is the image used to link to the Family Research Council's current campaign, which appears on the same page as Hitch's snapshot with the happy-clappy interns:<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7674/481/1600/marriage_102403.gif"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7674/481/320/marriage_102403.gif" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />I wonder if his rider for the gig was the same case of scotch and 200-pack of Rothmans he gets at Hay-on-Wye?<br /><br />And it doesn't stop there. I recently came across what's actually a fairly oldish <a href="http://www.socialistunitynetwork.co.uk/voices/hitchens.htm">article</a> by Tawfiq Chawbourne, who managed to snag a quick and dirty thirty-second interview with the great man on the way out of some London to-do with Francis 'Marx would have approved of the invasion of Iraq' Wheen moderating and Ian McEwan in the audience.<br /><br />Hitch actually offers Tawfiq an endorsement of the Bush policy on Venezuela, which regular readers will remember as having been a policy that encourages rightist coups. Chris then seems to even go so far as to approve of a Bay of Pigs redux. Says Christopher, 'Chavez is a thug. He’ll be gone within two years, as will the Iranian regime. And Bush will be landing in Havana within two years. Then the last two uniformed leaders [in the Americas] will be gone.'<br /><br />However over-represented they are in the press, however few of them there may be, and however incoherent their arguments, pro-war leftists do in fact exist, but Hitchens is not one of them. An anti-Chavez, pro-invasion-of-Cuba, softly-racist, Sarkozy-sympathising, Weekly-Standard-publishing, Family-Research-Council-Witherspoon-lecture-giving, Laura-Ingraham-show-appearing individual cannot with any gleaning of truth left to the statement be called a leftist, regardless of his position on the war.<br /><br />Nonetheless, I am at a loss as to an explanation how all this developed. Shock at 9/11 and any subsequent support for the war does not necessitate indifference to New Orleans or Clichy-sous-Bois suffering.<br /><br />Lenny of the Tomb <a href="http://leninology.blogspot.com/2005/11/christopher-hitchens-bad-language.html">reckons </a>'the trauma of losing a good friend of his on 9/11…catalysed a turn to the right that he had been slowly making for years.' However, I'm not entirely convinced by the Paul Berman thesis that the 'muscular liberal' philosophy of Hitchens and other pro-war progressives, had been in gestation since the Balkan Wars or even as far back as the Rushdie-Le Carré brou-ha-ha. Although I was opposed to 1999's Nato bombing of Yugoslavia, I'll readily admit that the Balkan Wars were not easily ideologically navigable, and a good many who have been opposed to the war since the bombing of Afghanistan - such as the late Susan Sontag - were with Hitchens on the question of intervention in Bosnia and later Kosovo. Furthermore, while almost the entirety of the soft left in the US turned away while Clinton introduced his welfare reforms, expanded the death penalty, diminished health care funding (and in so doing restricted abortion access), enforced developing world structural adjustment and constructed the WTO, Hitchens pulled no punches. He was relentless in his assaults on Clintonian triangulation. If Hitchens' current positions are indeed part of a general trend dating back fifteen years, then there is a rather long, eight-year stretch of recalcitrant progressivism that is unaccounted for in the model.<br /><br />I'd also not heard that Hitch had lost anyone, and am of the opinion that if he had, as he is more than shameless enough to exploit the person's memory, he would have mentioned it repeatedly. So I dragged out my copy of <em>Love, Poverty & War</em> from underneath the kitchen table's uneven leg, and re-read what Hitch had written immediately after 11 September.<br /><br />Hitch's very first piece after 9/11, 'We're Still Standing', for the Evening Standard on 12 September, begins with, 'Well, I won't see Barbara Olson again.'<br /><br />However, one doesn't get a sense from the article that she was his friend, merely that he knew her. Furthermore, in the days immediately after the towers fell, there was much talk of Olson's last minutes, as she had used her phone to alert her husband, the solicitor-general, of the hijacking. It may be more that Hitch was just mentioning that he happened to know a personnage that was in the headlines.<br /><br />In any case, both this piece, and his second, on 13 September, for the Guardian, 'The Morning After', are actually of a radically different political perspective to everything he has written since, beginning with the now well-known 'Against Rationalisation,' on 20 September, for the Nation, where he would begin to stake out his liberal hawk position. Indeed, in the Guardian piece, Hitchens is quite critical of Bush, writing:<br /><br />'The United States as a country has no fixed position on Islamic fundamentalism. It has used it as an ally, as well as discovered it as an enemy. It could not bomb Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, even if it found conclusive proof that the hijackers and assassins had actually trained there. So what does the president mean when he says so portentously that "we shall make no distinction between the terrorists and those who harbour them"? It looks like a distinction without a difference, and gives a momentary impression of being decisive, while actually only confusing the issue.'<br /><br />And what is the issue of which he writes? Interestingly, it's the history of America's foreign policy:<br /><br />'On the campus where I am writing this, there are a few students and professors willing to venture points about United States foreign policy. But they do so very guardedly, and it would sound like profane apologetics if transmitted live. So the <em>analytical moment</em>, if there is to be one, has been indefinitely postponed.' [Italics added]<br /><br />Seven days later, he must have decided that the analytical moment was to be <em>permanently</em> postponed, and made a 180 degree turn away from this initial perspective with 'Against Rationalisation', and its follow-up, 'Of Sin, the Left, and Islamic Fascism', in which he attacked the left for saying essentially the same things he had said in his first two post-9/11 articles.<br /><br />So, even if he had been close friends with Olson - which isn't clear in any case - he was still willing to 'rationalise' (his word) the attacks for at least another two articles after she had died. Thus the mystery is what made him change his mind within this seven-day period. If the shift had coincided with the attacks, his analysis would be fairly explicable, i.e., he was so shocked by the attacks that he reconsidered his perspective, etc., etc. - the similar arguments we heard from a number of liberal hawks - but it didn't.<br /><br />The only point I've heard that attempts to explain this seven-day turnaround was that a close friend of his tore into him about the 'The Morning After' piece in the Guardian for much the same reason that he has since torn into Chomsky. However, I've only ever read this hypothesis once, and I can't remember where I read it or who this critic-friend was.<br /><br />What I find curious is that none of his opponents has mentioned this. He's regularly asked by interviewers sympathetic and hostile why and when did he change his opinions, and he always responds that he didn't change, the Left did, and then produces this quaint story about being in a jeep during the first Gulf War with some Kurds who had a photo of George Bush Sr. attached to the vehicle which made him re-think his opinions, but this is an <em>ex post facto</em> reorganisation of his political trajectory accepted both by admirers and critics. The truth is that he changed quite abruptly some time between the 13th and 20th of September, 2001.<br /><br />In the end, however, whatever it was that shifted him on the question of 11 September - as well as the battles this shift engendered between him and the left - have so comprehensively transformed his ideas that he is now, from belligerent, triple-chinned tip to lewdly blotto stern, not merely or even a liberal hawk, but a reactionary, <em>sine macula</em>.Victor Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02227614963664976833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7655406.post-1131467956008950412005-11-08T17:39:00.000+01:002005-11-08T18:13:10.716+01:00Profitting from the riotsMost people when they see Paris and, as of last night, 300 other cities, burning on the news, they see a riot. The UMP, the France's conservative party and the party of Sarkozy, de Villepin and Chirac, however, see a <em>marketing opportunity</em>.<br /><br />If you type in the word '<em>émeute</em>' (French for 'riot') into the Google.fr search engine, the first link that appears is entitled <em>'Violences en Banlieues'</em> ('Violence in the suburbs') and is a sponsored link to http://www.u-m-p.org/. Underneath, the tag reads: <em>'Soutenez la politique de N. Sarkozy pour rétablir l'ordre républicain'</em> ('Support the policies of N. Sarkozy to re-establish the republican order'). Refresh the page, and the tag changes to <em>'Soutenez la politique de N. Sarkozy pour faire respecter la loi'</em> ('Support the policies of N. Sarkozy to ensure respect for the law').<br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/123/1320/1024/emeute%20web.jpg"></a><br /><img style="BORDER-RIGHT: #000000 1px solid; BORDER-TOP: #000000 1px solid; MARGIN: 2px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 1px solid; BORDER-BOTTOM: #000000 1px solid" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/123/1320/400/emeute%20web.jpg" border="0" /><br /><br />Reuters is reporting that Franck Louvrier, Sarkozy's spokesman, said the company hired by the UMP to run the website paid for the link as a way to respond to the 'thousands' of voters who were e-mailing messages of support.<br /><br />Right...take out an ad on Google that is to appear whenever anyone looks up the word 'émeute' to tell the people who have sent a message of support to send <em>another</em> message of support?<br /><br />***<br /><br />Meanwhile, elsewhere internautical, three French bloggers have been arrested for allegedly 'inciting violence' by using their blogs to encourage people to join the riots, justice minister Pascal Clement told a media conference yesterday. The bloggers, all aged 16 and from Aix-en-Provence in the south, 'called for riots and an attack on police stations'. Their blogs were hosted by a site owned by a youth radio station, Skyrock, which has since shut them down.<br /><br />I wonder if Reporters Sans Frontieres will rally to their defence. Hmm. No, they're not funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, so probably not.<br /><br />***<br /><br />Wikipedia already has a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Clichy-sous-Bois_riots">page</a> up on the rebellion, and the full, unedited version of Naima Bouteldja's piece for the Guardian yesterday is now up on the Radical Activist Network <a href="http://www.radicalactivist.net/articles/explosion.htm">website</a>. If you can read French, <a href="http://paris.indymedia.org/sommaire.php3">Indymedia Paris</a> is doing what the Indymedia network is best at - offering up-to-the-minute coverage of large-scale protests. (Understandably, the loading time takes ages)<br /><br />The Bethune Audomarois <a href="http://www.local.attac.org/attac62/">branch</a> of Attac, the France-based altermondialiste network, has issued a communiqué expressing solidarity with the 'poor of the suburbs' (hat tip to Kersplebedeb, a Montréal anarchist who is maintaining a very useful blog, <a href="http://sketchythoughts.blogspot.com/">Sketchy Thoughts</a>, translating key articles from the French press into English):<br /><br /><em>Communiqué de attac Béthune </em><br /><em></em><br /><em>"attac Béthune Audomarois" exprime clairement et publiquement sa solidarité avec les exclus des banlieues victimes du système de Messieurs Sarkozy et consorts. La logique Ultra-Libérale conduit toujours au mensonge,à la misère, à l'exclusion et à la violence. Nous en voyons aujourd'hui les résultats.</em><br /><br /><em>UN AUTRE MONDE EST POSSIBLE</em><br /><br /><strong>Communiqué from ATTAC Béthune </strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>ATTAC Béthune Audomarois publicly and unambiguously declares its solidarity with the people in the poor suburbs, victims of the system of Mr Sarkozy and his friends. The logic of ultra-liberalism always leads to lies, suffering, marginalization and violence. Today we are seeing the results. </strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE </strong><br /><br />Lenny at the Tomb has a rather good <a href="http://leninology.blogspot.com/2005/11/models-pathologies-and-liberal.html">analysis</a> of the commentary on the French riots by Tech Central Station's resident Hitchens-fartcatcher, Michael J. Totten, an atrocious writer who exemplifies the rarely disguised racism that is at the very belly-button of liberal-hawkdom:<br /><br /><br /><blockquote>Here, then, is the authentic white supremacist posing as a connoisseur of cosmopolitanism, cross-cultural understanding. The fixtures of Orientalist and outright racist discourse are harnessed to the cause of liberal internationalism. </blockquote><br />Talking of little shits who write as well as a toothbrush, anyone else who thought that Emma Brockes 'interview' with Noam Chomsky in the Guardian last week was as vomitous as a banana Gorgonzola milkshake might want to meander over to Counterpunch, where they <a href="http://www.counterpunch.com/cockburn11052005.html">compare</a> Brockes' glib fabrications about Chomsky with her brownnosing Ariel 'Sabra and Shatila' Sharon in another interview (and have dug out a quote from another interview where the little thickie admits that she finds Chomsky hard to understand).<br /><br />***<br />I completely forgot about this, but a couple of months ago, UK radical charity War on Want put up a short video clip of Belle and Sebastian's visit to the occupied territories, with some great Palestinian hip-hop on the soundtrack. Ch-ch-check it <a href="http://www.waronwant.org/?lid=10598">out</a>.<br /><br />***<br />This one's just for shits and giggles:<br /><br /><br /><img style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7674/481/200/glavin4.0.jpg" border="0" /><br />That's Republican activist Matthew Glavin, who preached upstanding, God-fearing family values until he was caught masturbating in public and fondling an undercover park ranger. He is just one example in a seemingly boundless list of Republican hypocrisy you can find at the <a href="http://www.armchairsubversive.com/">'Stop Republican Paedophilia'</a> site from the Armchair Subversive.<br /><br />***<br />And here is everyone's favourite creative-writing-undergraduates-who-decided-to-start-a-band band, the Decemberists, in a 40-odd-minute <a href="http://kcrw.com/smil/mb050421The_Decemberists.ram">live session</a> at KCRW, the campus station of Santa Monica College. Why? Because they're the Decemberists, d'uh.<br /><br />***<br /><strong>UPDATE:</strong> (Via <a href="http://deadmenleft.blogspot.com/2005/11/lcr-statement.html">Dead Men Left</a>) The LCR's 2002 presidential candidate and one of France's most popular politicians, Olivier Besancenot, has <a href="http://www.lcr-rouge.org/breve.php3?id_breve=430">called </a>for demonstrations defying the curfews. From DML's translation of the announcement:<br /><blockquote>... the LCR calls for demonstrations against the curfew in communes or quartiers, at night if necessary, where it would be instituted by the prefect. The LCR invites all organisations of the left and of democracy to organise these demonstrations together.<br /></blockquote>Victor Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02227614963664976833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7655406.post-1131382772130330582005-11-07T17:42:00.000+01:002005-11-08T00:59:39.320+01:00'L'Intifada Française' - Between Ramallah '00 and Paris '68The press across Europe are saying the 'immigrant' youth (in quotations for the obvious reason that though they are young Frenchmen of the third or fourth generation, and many may not even speak the Arabic of their fathers or grandfathers, they are eternally immigrants) of the French <em>banlieues</em>, or suburbs, are '<a href="http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,383623,00.html">trying their hand at revolution</a>'. The talking heads on the news discussion programmes are calling Clichy-sous-Bois - the suburb in northeastern Paris where the unrest began after two young men died, accidentally electrocuting themselves when they hid from police in an electric substation - '<em>Ramallah</em>-sous-Bois'. Der Spiegel <a href="http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,383623-2,00.html">refers </a>to the youths as 'urban guerillas' and 'generation jihad', while <a href="http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9938333/site/newsweek/">Newsweek</a> feverishly asks whether 'the riots [will] swell the ranks of jihadists in Europe' and calls the events the 'beginning of jihad in Europe'.<br /><br />This is all more than a bit over the top, and drips with the very undisguised racism that is the cause of the disturbances. As <a href="http://www.sos-racisme.org/">S.O.S. Racisme</a>, the French anti-racist organisation notes and denounces in a press release yesterday, the press 'have presented the events as a civil war, describing the participants as savages, with some even calling the riots the "Intifada of the banlieues".' While the last eleven days and nights have seen France's worst domestic unrest since 1968, with some 4,700 vehicles set on fire - 1,400 last night alone in riots that have now spread to the suburbs of most of the country's large cities - as far north as Lille and to Nice in the southeast, as the always perspicacious Lenin, of the blog Lenin's Tomb, <a href="http://leninology.blogspot.com/2005/11/fear-loathing-in-france.html">notes</a>, situations such as these tend to go 'up like the rocket, [and] down like the stick'. These days of rage are unlikely to last, much as May 1968 itself lasted but a few days whatever its remembrance in the French popular imagination.<br /><br />Nonetheless, the commentators, even if they articulate themselves through the orientalist prism, alight on the heart of the matter: Europe, like anywhere else in this deregulated, unemployed, privatised, pulverised, atomised, lobotomised cosmos, where the slavering corybantic market fundamentalists would yet privatise the heavens and lay off Saint Peter and the Archangel Gabriel if they thought it would enable them to compete better with Estonia's flat tax, sits atop a powder keg of righteous anger, the predictable product of gross inequality and racism both within its borders and in its relations with the developing world.<br /><br />The French suburbs - <em>les cités</em> - are overcrowded ghettoes where the descendents of workers brought to France to alleviate the post-war labour shortage live in a violent, boring poverty not dissimilar to that experienced in other European immigrant quarters and American 'projects' and barrios. The oeuvre of the most popular comedian in France, <a href="http://www.jameldebbouze.fr">Jamel Debbouze</a>, whom non-French audiences will know from his appearances in <em>Amélie</em> and Spike Lee's <em>She Hate Me</em>, is entirely based around tales of poverty and police brutality in the banlieues. His recent hit spectacle includes a hilarious running gag on middle class teachers sent to teach in the ZEPs (<em>zones d’éducation prioritaires</em>) who fear their pupils, and, most presciently, being chased by <em>les keufs</em>. American journalist Doug Ireland, who lived in France for ten years, where he worked as a reporter for left-wing daily Libération, <a href="http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2005/11/why_is_france_b.html">describes</a> <em>les cités</em> on his blog in a posting entitled 'Rebellion of a lost generation':<br /><br /><blockquote>[T]hese high-rise human warehouses in the isolated suburbs are today run-down, dilapidated, sinister places, with broken elevators that remain unrepaired, heating systems left dysfunctional in winter, dirt and dog-shit in the hallways, broken windows, and few commercial amenities - shopping for basic necessities is often quite limited and difficult, while entertainment and recreational facilities for youth are truncated and totally inadequate when they're not non-existent.</blockquote><br />Crime follows such economic dislocation like regret follows a kebab, but rather than tackle the economic root of the problem, <em>comme toujours</em>, the French interior ministry's response, under the diminutive-but-martial minister and pretender to Chirac's crown, Nicolas Sarkozy, has been what S.O.S. Racisme calls <em>'l’extrémisme sécuritaire'</em>: violent, 'zero tolerance' crackdowns, that unfortunately are massively popular amongst the usual hang-'em-high suspects.<br /><br />UK-based campaigner Naima Bouteldja, writing in today's Guardian, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,11882,1635906,00.html">recounts</a> how earlier this year the level of police repression and racism resulted in Amnesty International criticising 'the "generalised impunity" with which the French police [have] operated when it came to violent treatment of young men from African backgrounds during identity checks.'<br /><br />Sarkozy reacted to the initial riots in typical fashion, describing the rioters as vermin and scum, although, as both Bouteldja and Ireland note, something has been lost in translation. Says Ireland:<br /><br /><blockquote>'"Sarko" made headlines with his declarations that he would "karcherise" the ghettos of "la racaille" - words the U.S. press, with glaring inadequacy, has translated to mean "clean" the ghettos of "scum." But these two words have an infinitely harsher and insulting flavor in French. "Karcher" is the well-known brand name of a system of cleaning surfaces by super-high-pressure sand-blasting or water-blasting that very violently peels away the outer skin of encrusted dirt - like pigeon-shit - even at the risk of damaging what's underneath. To apply this term to young human beings and proffer it as a strategy is a verbally fascist insult and, as a policy proposed by an Interior Minister, is about as close as one can get to hollering "ethnic cleansing" without actually saying so. It implies raw police power and force used very aggressively, with little regard for human rights…"[R]acaille" is infinitely more pejorative than "scum" to French-speakers - it has the flavor of characterising an entire group of people as subhuman, inherently evil and criminal, worthless.' </blockquote><br />This, together with the tear-gassing of a mosque, only aggravated the situation.<br /><br />The paternalist left has abandoned them at best, and at worst actively participates in racist and Islamophobic attacks disguised as a defence of <em>la laïcité républicaine</em>, and the far left is only marginally better. The left must remember, as in New Orleans, globalisation is not merely a question of class, but explicitly one of race (and, one might add, gender).<br /><br />It is true that this abandonment of the field allows fundamentalists to fill the void, just as a similar attitude by social democrats to their traditional (white) working class constituency opens the door to the far right, but it is not true, as not a few have been reporting, that the riots are a product of Islamist agents provocateurs. First of all, it should be noted that the rioters are not just <em>'beurs'</em> - French <em>verlan</em> for Arabs - but also black youth. Secondly, to be sure, the riots are anger uncorked, but there is also an explicit political aspect to their actions: "We'll stop when Sarkozy steps down," said a Strasbourg rioter, according to the Guardian. Liberation's interviews with the youth published today show how <em>'encore et toujours'</em> the anger reduces to Sarkozy. <em>'C'est nous qui allons passer Sarkozy au Kärcher, c'est l'erreur de sa carrière</em>. [It is us who will Karcherise Sarkozy. He's made the error of his career.]' says one thirteen-year-old. Another pair declare quite perceptively that Sarko's provocation was simply to put '<em>l'insécurité</em>', or crime, back on the agenda ahead of the 2007 presidential elections.<br /><br />There is a line that runs through the recent strikes - economic, political and general - of France, Belgium and Italy, the movement against Agenda 2010 and vote for the Linkspartei in Germany, and the vote against the neo-liberal European Constitution in the Netherlands and France, and, yes, even the election of the socially conservative but fiscally semi-Keynesian PiS in Poland - and the French riots. This reaction to neo-liberalism is uneven. It cannot in all regions and at all times be called progressive - no one is celebrating these riots - and in parts (particularly in Poland) is incoherent, and can just as easily swing over to the far right or Islamists if the left does not take a lead, but it is nonetheless the inescapable product of years of rightist economic retrenchment combined with, in the case of the French riots, festering racism and exclusion.<br /><br />All those who believe in a 'social Europe' must address this unrest. To turn Thatcher's commandment on its head - <em>We have no alternative</em>: we must not merely protect but expand Europe's social provision, or else the fires of Paris' suburbs will spread right across the continent, one day or another.<br /><br />Above all, the French anti-neo-liberal left must act with urgency within the next few days to attempt to channel this justifiable anger into a constructive direction and connect it to the wider dissatisfaction with neo-liberalism. The LCR and the PCF would do well to organise demonstrations across France against police brutality, for an end to l’extrémisme sécuritaire, for reinvestment and jobs in the banlieues, for the integration of their inhabitants into French society, and, in particular, calling for Sarkozy's resignation.<br /><br /><em>Nous sommes tous indésirables. Nous sommes tous racailles.</em><br /><em></em><br /><em>***</em><br /><em></em><br /><strong>Update:</strong> The arson has spread (to a <em>quite</em> limited degree) to <a href="http://www.expatica.com/source/site_article.asp?subchannel_id=24&story_id=25121&name=Cars+torched+in+Brussels%2Cbut+riot+fears+downplayed+">Brussels</a>, with five cars set on fire near Gare du Midi (<em>à deux pas de chez moi</em>, eek), and <a href="http://www.tageblatt.lu/edition/article.asp?ArticleId=41955">Berlin</a>, where another five cars were set alight in the Moabit quarter.Victor Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02227614963664976833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7655406.post-1130840217327959012005-11-01T11:14:00.000+01:002005-11-01T13:27:02.026+01:00Müntefering leaves in a huff, taking his ball home with him<span style="font-family:times new roman;">Intriguing little giblet out of Germany: top of the fold news this morning is that SPD party leader Franz 'Plague of Locusts' Müntefering, who had been expected to take the positions of vice-chancellor and labour minister in an SPD-CDU coalition government, has said he does not intend to run for re-election next month. The understandable hook for the press is how the resignation deals a fairly heavy blow to the coalition talks - now in their fourth round.<br /></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Indeed, Tobias Schwarz at A Fistful of Euros is </span><a href="http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/002043.php"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">reporting </span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;">that there have been a handful of reports in the German press about the CDU leadership's 'silently beginning preparations for yet another round of elections to be held on March 26, when there are also state and/or local elections to be held in Rheinland-Pfalz, Baden-Württemberg, and Sachsen-Anhalt'. And Deutsche Welle is (somewhat wishful-thinkingly, IMO) </span><a href="http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,1762061,00.html"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">saying </span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;">that the so-called Jamaica coalition - CDU, Greens and Free Democrats - is not completely off the table, reporting that FDU leader Guido Westerwelle said 'he was willing to restart discussions about a so-called Jamaica coalition of CDU/CSU, Greens and his party'.<br /><br />'"Angela Merkel has my number," he said in an interview on German public broadcaster ARD.'<br /><br />Müntefering's departure frustrates the coalition talks as he was 'viewed as 'key to holding together a potentially fractious coalition,' also according to Deutsche Welle. 'Viewed' by whom is not clear, given the sentence's shady passive construction, but DW probably means 'viewed by the bien-pensants of the SPD's right wing'. And herein is the interesting little nugget: The reason Müntefering left, taking his ball with him, was that former youth wing leader and the unofficial leader of the SPD's left wing, Andrea Nahles, 35, won a vote by the party's executive committee to become the next general secretary, handily beating Müntefering's preferred candidate. As the New York Times is <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/01/international/europe/01germany.html?hp">reporting</a>, 'Mr. Müntefering [and] Mr. Schröder, 61, represent an older generation of Social Democrats that is increasingly at odds with younger party members. Some of these up-and-comers are staunchly leftist and opposed Mr. Schröder's efforts to overhaul the German economy.' Nahles - a <a href="http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,382604,00.html">former protégé</a> of Oscar Lafontaine - recently built a reputation for herself as an outspoken opponent of Schroeder's reforms, organising a movement within the SPD in favour of more socially oriented policies. This development was what ultimately forced the Chancellor to call early elections aiming to stave off an open revolt within the party. Rather than staunching the intra-party disquiet, however, the election has accelerated it.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><a href="http://www.dw-world.de/image/0,,1753034_1,00.jpg"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 174px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 141px" height="218" alt="" src="http://www.dw-world.de/image/0,,1753034_1,00.jpg" border="0" /></span></a><br /></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:78%;"></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:78%;">Andrea Nahles</span> </span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'I can no longer be party chairman under these conditions,' Müntefering told reporters in response to his candidate's loss.<br /><br />Despite his electoral gambit earlier this year of describing foreign investors as akin to a plague of locusts, aiming to shore up the SPD's then (and continuing) rapidly atrophying support amongst its traditional voters, Müntefering remains as committed to the neo-liberal reforms of the outgoing government as ever. The party may be looking over its shoulder at the growing support for the Linkspartei and attempting to push the SPD leftwards, and the rank-and-file, never happy with Hartz IV and Agenda 2010 is distinctly uncomfortable with the idea of a grand coalition with the CDU, but Müntefering will have none of this.<br /><br />In any case, if there is another election, I can't see the conservatives gaining from the situation. Furthermore, the Linke have shown they are not merely a protest vote, but now the fourth party in the country - their support is not going to disappear; it can only grow as SPD voters feel safe in the knowledge that a vote for Lafontaine & co. is not throwing their vote away. An SPD that tacks to the left might actually pick up a few votes as well.<br /><br />Whatever happens, European social democracy (outside Mr. Magoo-like New Labour) is clearly in crisis as it is caught between the economic imperatives of globalisation and the demands of its supporters and the wider electorate. </span>Victor Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02227614963664976833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7655406.post-1130366092128370922005-10-27T00:18:00.000+02:002005-10-27T00:51:20.323+02:00Carrying on regardless: European social democrats fumble the post-referendum crisis<span style="font-size:85%;"><strong>NB. You might want to print this one off if you, like me, prefer a more commodious reading apparatus, such as paper - as it was seven pages in Word when I wrote it.</strong><br /><em></em></span><br /><em>European social democrats haven't rediscovered their socialist roots at all with this new waffle about protecting 'Social Europe' - they've just rediscovered the language of solidarity and equality following their summer of defeats at the hands of the extra-parliamentary left. They want to woo back their base, but they remain as committed to neo-liberalism as ever.</em><br /><br /><br />European social democrats aren't quite running scared yet, but a good number are looking over their shoulders as the various domestic examples of the anti-neo-liberal left - the 'Gauche du Non' - who had quite eclatant successes in the French and Dutch referenda on the European Constitution and have even begun to poach left-wing votes at the fringes, viz. Germany's new Linkspartei. For all the humbuggery about No votes being expressions of nationalistic provincialism and xenophobia, it was quickly conceded by soc-dem strategists after the votes that 'No' voters were not anti-European, so much as fearful of the transplantation of the European social model with an 'Anglo-Saxon', or neo-liberal, one, and so their parties had better 'shore up their base', and quick-like.<br /><br />Thus at the start of the month, the <a href="http://www.pes.org/">Party of European Socialists</a> - the centre-left grouping within the European Parliament that gathers together the MEPs from member states' Labour, social democratic and socialist parties - launched <a href="http://www.pes.org/content/view/262">'A New Social Europe'</a>, its response to the post-referendum crisis - a half-day conference accompanied by the publication a discussion document, 'PES - Social Europe: First contributions to the debate'. The pamphlet aims to kick off a discussion 'between PES member parties on how to combine Europe's traditional levels of social protection…with international competitiveness'.<br /><br />In the pamphlet, the traditional brusqueness of the <em>There Is No Alternative</em> (but liberalisation and deregulation) discourse has disappeared, replaced with cozy platitudes about Social Europe. Liberalisation and deregulation are still there, and there remains no alternative, comrades, but now the discourse is peppered throughout with words such as 'solidarity' and 'equality' and 'Horlicks'. Okay, so there's no mention of Horlicks at all, but the booklet's tone remains all warm and fuzzy. However, just like the nourishing malted food drink, this only temporarily masks the bitter aftertaste that comes with the repeated mention of 'flexibility', 'reform' and 'competitiveness'.<br /><br />Franz Müntefering, the chairperson of Germany's SPD, may have caused the financial press to have kittens when in April he sought to woo left-wing voters abandoning the SPD by describing foreign investors as 'a plague of locusts', and he may have begun his short essay for the PES pamphlet, 'Modernising the Social Market Economy', with a load of waffle about the strong needing to protect the weak, but ultimately he's the same old Neue Mittel partisan he has been for years:<br /><br /><blockquote>'Preserving the social market economy…requires…<strong>courage</strong> to implement changes.'<br /><br />'With the reforms of Agenda 2010 [the social restructuring that produced the massive protest movement that gave birth to the WASG and subsequently the Linkspartei], we…implement[ed] this strategy…with a sense of <strong>courage</strong>.'<br /><br />'The SPD…have had the <strong>courage</strong> to act in spite of having to cope with the resistance of many.'<br /><br />'If we go on implementing this policy and advance together and with <strong>courage</strong>…then this will benefit…the social market economy in Germany…[and] in Europe.<br /></blockquote>He's one courageous man, that Frankie, mentioning the word a full four times in a two-page article.<br /><br />Similarly, Greek PASOK MP and former European Commissioner Anna Diamantopoulou begins her contribution with a entirely sensible, neo-Keynesian call for financing of large-scale European infrastructure projects as a method of priming the European pump, but she quickly back on-message, repeating the neo-liberal myth that inflexible labour markets are the cause of high unemployment - rather than the inevitable product of overcapacity, capital flight, economic sabotage by investors or all three - and calls for labour market reform and invents a wretchedly disingenuous neologism in the process: 'flexi-curity'.<br /><br />Meanwhile, UK Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, in addressing the conference, seems to have never received the memo about the new touchy-feely talking points, launching as he did straight into a 'We're so great, us in the UK, and you lot'll stop sucking so hard as soon as you're more like us' lecture on the godlike qualities of the British economy. You'll have heard the laundry list of New Labour's achievements before - 'record levels of employment', 'lifted almost a million children out of poverty,' 'turned water into wine,' 'raised Lazarus from the dead,' etc., etc. What goes without mention, natch, is how many of the jobs created are McJobs, the massive growth in inequality under Blair and that in any case it's all just based on irrationally exuberant consumers buying Stargate: Atlantis DVD box-sets and Philips Men's All-Body Shavers with money they don't have. And it goes without saying that he didn't mention economists' worries that the wheels are about to come off the British economy.<br /><br />While a number of continental social democrats have noticed that 'the rejection of the proposed EU constitution in the recent referendums [sic] in France and the Netherlands [has] raised difficult questions about the direction the EU should take…[with] Europe's citizens worried about jobs, quality of life and growth,' as Vladimír Špidla, the Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities and founding member of the Czech Social Democratic Party puts it in his contribution to the PES document, New Labour seems to be carrying on regardless, with the same prescriptions and discourse as ever.<br /><br />But those who naively believe that there could be a change of course under Gordon Brown would do well to peruse the contribution to the debate of Douglas Alexander, the UK's minister for Europe and ally of Mr. Brown.<br /><br />The solution to the European crisis remains for both Blair and Brown the Anglicisation of Europe's economies, and Mr. Alexanders' pamphlet, <a href="http://fpc.org.uk/publications/178">'Europe in a Global Age'</a>, published this month by the Foreign Policy Centre, sets out in some detail the Brownite vision of the future of social Europe.<br /><br />In response to the crisis, Alexander recommends a prescription of four elements: social and economic restructuring, trade liberalisation, remove agricultural protections and export subsidies, and a rejection of Europe as superstate. He warns against 'overregulation' and introspection, approvingly quoting the New York Times' evangelist of neo-liberal globalisation, Thomas Friedman.<br /><br />Claiming to concern himself with the welfare of the twenty million Europeans out of work, he says that such high rates of unemployment are due to 'something in European social structures which inhibits work and economic gain' and that the continent must embrace necessary change of an Anglo-Saxon nature: 'It's a sobering and challenging insight that if the EU were an American state, it would be 46th out of 50, at about the same level of wealth as Alabama.'<br /><br />No fewer thank six times does Alexander attack greater European political integration, saying, 'the EU must confidently assert its own identity as neither a nation state nor a superstate,' and that '[a] superstate…is not where the future lies…The best description and prescription for today's European Union is a close Union of nation states, working together in those many areas where co-operation can add value' Indeed, the entire final chapter is devoted to extinguishing the hopes of those who dream of an ever closer political union. Furthermore, however many peacekeeping or other military missions the EU may be engaged in overseas, 'Nato remains the primary guarantor of Britain's defence,' not any future European force.<br /><br />Indeed, the document is so critical of Europe, one could be forgiven for thinking the minister for Europe isn't a pro-European, but actually, the rationale for Alexander's Superstate-phobia is that while he recognises that only as part of the EU can little Britain compete with the continent-sized economies of the US, China and India and is thus happy to encourage the completion of a single market, the democracy, or at least closer political integration that must accompany such economic integration has the danger of imposing on the UK continental social protections.<br /><br />This is why Alexander is at pains to point out that in fact there is no such thing as a single European social model, but rather there are four different paths to social protection in Europe. He cites a report by economist Andre Sapir, of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, for an EU finance ministers' meeting last September (as did, by the way, John Prescott, and The Economist's Charlemagne in a recent column on European social policies tellingly entitled 'Choose your poison'), who divided European welfare systems into four types: the Continental one, typified by French and German generous benefit systems and strong worker protections; the Mediterranean version, seen in Spain, Italy and Greece, in which there are some of the strongest worker protections laws in Europe, but relatively weak benefit systems, as until recently the family in these more strongly Catholic and Orthodox countries was seen as the safety net more so than the state; the Nordic edition, found in Scandinavia and the Netherlands, which has traditionally offered strong benefits and income redistribution, but has seen considerable deregulation of worker protections over the past decade; and finally the Anglo-Saxon (including Ireland) model, in which there is weak social protection and weak job protection.<br /><br />Sapir concluded that, given the competitive pressures of globalisation and the demographic pressures of an aging population, only the 'Anglo-Saxon and Nordic models are sustainable, while Continental and Mediterranean models are not and must be reformed in the direction of greater efficiency by reducing disincentives to work and to grow.'<br /><br />Predictably, Alexander spends a great deal of time attacking the Common Agricultural Policy, and he is right. Agricultural protectionism by both Europe and the US has criminally brutal effects on farmers in the developing world. Closer to home, the 40 per cent of Europe's budget that is spent on the CAP could certainly be spent more wisely - a Europe-wide childcare programme, perhaps? Nonetheless, one suspects all this talk of concern for third-world farmers is just a screen for a defence of the UK rebate.<br /><br />More broadly, Alexander would like to see at the European level and by other member states deregulation that 'eases the burden on business and promotes competitiveness', a recognition of 'the importance of the transatlantic marketplace' and the 'liberalisation of trade in services', by which he means advancement of the <a href="http://www.gatswatch.org/">GATS</a>.<br /><br />This last prescription is of particular concern. The EU is currently engaged in negotiations surrounding the progression of a General Agreement on Trade in Services. The GATS is a trade agreement enforced by the WTO, established in 1994 at the conclusion of the Uruguay Round of the GATT.<br /><br />The negotiations are as transparent as molasses, but under pressure from progressive NGOs such as France's Attac, as well as trade unions and student groups, information surrounding the GATS has to some extent been revealed.<br /><br />It is the first multi-lateral agreement on services and covers the grand expanse of the service sector. It aims at 'progressively rising the level of liberalisation' of the service sector with the ultimate aim of full liberalisation of trade in services and the elimination of government non-tariff 'barriers' to international competition in the services sector such as regulations, laws, quotas and standards.<br /><br />As Maude Barlow, of the Canadian altermondialist NGO Council of Canadians <a href="http://canadians.inline.net/display_document.htm?COC_token=024HO24&id=119&isdoc=1&catid=77">describes </a>the process:<br /><br /><br /><blockquote>'Essentially, the GATS is mandated to restrict government actions in regards to services through a set of legally binding constraints backed up by WTO-enforced trade sanctions. Its most fundamental purpose is to constrain all levels of government in their delivery of services and to facilitate access to government contracts by transnational corporations in a multitude of areas, including public health and education.<br /><br />'Infrastructure areas like transportation and telecommunication are included alongside financial services, architecture, electronic data processing services and tourism. Basic public services like education, health care and water also fall under the conditions of GATS.'<br /></blockquote><br />And what areas of government services are included? In advance of the 2000 GATS talks, the US conferred with the Coalition of Service Industries, the trade association representing the sector, asking what it would like to see included in a comprehensive GATS agreement. The European Commission did the same with the European Services Forum. The priority areas for the two groups, according to Ms. Barlow's research are health care; hospital care; home care; dental care; child care; elder care; education - primary, secondary and post-secondary; museums; libraries; law; social assistance; architecture; energy; water services; environmental protection services; real estate; insurance; tourism; postal services; transportation; publishing; and broadcasting.<br /><br />In short, Alexander's 'completion of liberalisation of trade in services' would see the entire public sector apart from the police and army pried open.<br /><br />Maude Barlow again:<br /><br /><br /><blockquote>'The U.S. has made its position clear. "The mandate of the negotiations is ambitious: to remove restrictions on trade in services and provide effective market access, subject to specified limitations. Our challenge is to accomplish significant removal of these restrictions across all services sectors, addressing measures currently subject to GATS disciplines and potentially measures not currently subject to GATS disciplines." In non-trade jargon, this means that the 137 members of the WTO have agreed to open up all of their service sectors to free trade laws and the same WTO enforcement powers that have struck down health, food safety and environmental laws in dozens of countries.<br />…<br /><br />'Simply put, the "commons" - or what's left of it - would be under full assault. What used to be areas of common heritage, like seeds and genes, air and water, culture and heritage, and health care and education, would now be slated to be commodified, privatised and sold to the highest bidder on the open market.'</blockquote><br />This is New Labour's response to the challenge from the left? This is the UK Presidency of the European Union's response to the post-referendum crisis and its prescription for the defence of Social Europe?<br /><br />If Sapir, Prescott, Alexander and Charlemagne are all comfortable in disaggregating Social Europe, let's deconstruct the much vaunted Anglo-Saxon model. First of all, there is no one Anglo-Saxon model. The US and UK may have both significantly weakened job protection, but even Blair's Britain has not seen its social provision stripped to the bone as has happened across the Atlantic. Furthermore, if we look further afield, the other Anglo-Saxon economies are just as varied, with Australia akin to the UK and Canada and New Zealand more akin to the Nordic or Continental models, but Canada's economy is putting along reasonably fortissimo at the mo, with little Franco-German stylee economic grimness.<br /><br />As a little pamphlet from the late Robin Cook's cupboard, <a href="http://fpc.org.uk/publications/173">'A New Deal for Social Europe'</a>, points out:<br /><br /><br /><blockquote>'[O]n any objective analysis, there is no correlation between levels of labour market regulation, taxation and public spending on the one hand, and economic performance on the other. If there were, the Danish Swedish Finnish Dutch and Austrian economies would be amongst the least successful economies instead of being amongst the best performing.'</blockquote><br />You couldn't fit a Kleenex between Blair and Brown's perspectives on Europe, but there are others in the Labour party who to some extent recognise the political terrain they have lost to the anti-neo-liberal left. Published a few weeks before Alexander's 'Global Age', 'New Deal' was written by a handful of the soft-left wonks, including David Clark, a special advisor to Robin Cook; and Stephen Twigg, the director of the Foreign Policy Centre and parliamentary secretary to Robin Cook when he was Leader of the Commons; as well as ETUC general-secretary John Monks; London mayor Ken Livingstone and former transport commissioner Neil Kinnock. But in reality, the New Deal document, a lively, fighting piece of work, is entirely Robin Cook's. Cook is doing battle with Brown over Europe from the grave.<br /><br />'The New Deal for Social Europe was really the brainchild of the late Robin Cook,' says Sarah Schaefer, the director of the Europe Programme at the Foreign Policy Centre, 'as he had considerable credibility with the trade unions and the left, but was strongly pro-Europe. The failure of the Yes side in the French and Dutch referenda had inspired him to formulate a progressive argument in favour of Europe.'<br /><br />Apart from a sprinkling of items, there is little in the way of policy prescription in the document that the anti-neo-liberal left would find disagreeable. In the introduction, the authors say, 'Europe must be more than a marketplace for the free movement of goods, services, labour and capital. It must be an instrument for regulating markets in the public interest.'<br /><br />'It is bound to be criticised by sections of the press as pro-European and because it rejects the Brownite point of view,' says Schaefer, 'but it was warmly received at the recent Labour Conference - largely because it was seen as Robin Cook's legacy.'<br /><br />In contrast to Alexander's work, the New Deal document argues straight away for further political integration, and explicitly takes on Alexander's preference for the nation-state:<br />'Those who are happy for the fate of humanity to be determined by the invisible hand of market forces or the aggregate of private choices believe they have nothing to fear from a world in which politics remains purely national. Indeed, they prefer conditions in which the decisions that matter are beyond the sovereign reach of elected governments.'<br /><br />In contrast, the authors believe that the European Union is a powerful enough actor that through it, citizens can once again direct their governments to do their bidding, more resistant as it is than the nation-state to the Banshee mistrals of global markets.<br /><br />As diplomatically as a document whose authorship includes Neil Kinnock can do so, it takes the Labour government to task for its emphasis on market liberalisation in its relations with Europe: 'Tony Blair said that he wanted a political and social Europe, not just a free trade zone…But words are no substitute for action and the positions taken by the British Labour government on, for instance, working time and information and consultation rights for employees have too often appeared to conflict with that aspiration.'<br /><br />The document also debunks the myth that Britons are less 'social' than those on the continent, pointing out through a series of surveys that in fact, 'in a number of key issues, British opinion often emerges as more egalitarian and socially progressive than several other European countries,' and so we can indeed talk about a commonality of social beliefs across the union, regardless of Andre Sapir's models.<br /><br />Futhermore, the document notes that those countries that have 'benefited most from glbalisation have done son by ignoring key tenets of neo-liberal ideology'. The governments of China and India remain heavily interventionist and employ capital controls, and the US uses its dollar reserve status to run external deficits that would otherwise force a country to deflate its economy. One might add that the US too, under Bush has engaged in an expansive programme of military Keynesianism, priming the pump in a much more destructive fashion than a Europe-wide childcare programme, and series of large-scale infrastructure projects would.<br /><br />The document calls for 'a new international economic order', with a global system of managed exchange rates and capital controls. The single currency makes Europe such a force in the global economy as to be able to press for such reforms. Parallel to this, argue the authors, could be an international clearing union, as a mechanism for managing global trade imbalances, and the integration of labour and environmental standards into world trade rules. Indeed, the authors go so far as to call for avenues of 'redistribution that replicate the European Union's social and regional policies on a global scale.'<br /><br />However, the report's solution to the economic malaise of France and Germany is where it runs aground, arguing wetly that increased investments in R&D, skills and lifelong learning will, erm, do something.<br /><br />This, of course, does nothing to deal with the much more fundamental problem facing the two countries: that investment decisions remain in the hands of investors, who in times of crisis remain too timid to make the correct investments that will pull the economy out of the slump, or, in the current case of France and especially Germany, who engage in acts of economic sabotage aiming at disciplining the workforce and broader nation into accepting massive structural change.<br /><br />Nonetheless, the report offers a pair of robust policy recommendations as practical options for counter-cyclical economic management with which the hard left would find it difficult to disagree: a European childcare guarantee, the establishment of a European Recovery Fund (originally advocated by the Labour Party ten years ago) or using the European Investment Bank's lending facility to fund new infrastructure projects.<br /><br />The report is however dead wrong in its concluding paragraphs on 'Strengthening European Democracy', in which it declares in some genre of act of willing suspension of disbelief, that there is no lack of democracy at the heart of the Union. As Susan George, the vice-president of <a href="http://www.france.attac.org">Attac France</a>, says in an <a href="http://www.europesworld.org/PDFs/EW1_2.2_George_Frances_non_marks_just_the_beginning.pdf">article </a>explaining the reasons for the No's victory in her country in the inaugural edition of <a href="http://www.europesworld.org/">Europe's World</a> - a sort of <a href="http://www.foreignaffairs.org">Foreign Affairs</a> journal just for Europe - the proposed constitution 'perpetuated a Commission that is independent of the will of the people, and a Parliament that cannot even initiate legislation, much less levy taxes.'<br /><br />However, the report does at least recommend the Union proceed with the creation of a position of President of the European Council as was proposed in the Constitution, but have the position be subjected to a direct Europe-wide election. Such a thought must strike fear into the heart of an Alexander, a Brown or a Blair - an elected President of the European Council? B-b-b-but that would mean that a social democrat or worse could theoretically be elected to the position, and no matter how impotent the office may be, could you imagine the horrible effect that would have on UK markets?<br /><br />For all this, is the document anything more than a propaganda exercise aimed at winning over left-wing eurosceptics in the UK?<br /><br />Alas, probably not. The FPC's Sarah Shaefer, which published both documents, admits that 'the difference is more in tone and emphasis than in content' despite all the markedly different policy prescriptions. After all, she points out, Neil Kinnock may have co-written A New Deal for Social Europe, but he also wrote the preface to Europe in a Global Age.<br /><br />'The two perspectives are not as opposed to each other as many would like them to be,' says Schaefer.<br /><br />'They're really aimed at different audiences: the Global Age document is targeted at a foreign audience, part of an attempt to persuade the continent to adopt the British model, while the New Deal document is targeted at a domestic audience, aimed at building a progressive case for Europe and in particular at persuading the trade unions.'<br /><br />The authors of the piece, or at least Cook, Twigg, Clark and Livingstone, may genuinely (have) believe(d) in what they have written, but then they aren't minister for Europe in the Foreign Office as Douglas Alexander is.<br /><br />Thus, in response to the post-referendum crisis, British social democracy where it counts is carrying on as if nothing has happened. But continental social democrats, who in the leadership, to a greater or lesser degree are really just as neo-liberal as Blair and Brown, have acted no differently. In response to the victory of the No, deaf to the votes of a clear majority of his own party's members, Francois Hollande, the leader of France's Socialists, a week after the referendum purged the party leadership of all those who supported the No campaign. 'Clearly we've rather pissed off voters and our supporters. The solution? More of the same.'<br /><br />In fact, there are about five different ways Europe's social democrats and socialists have reacted to the crisis:<br /><br /><blockquote>1) There is the <strong>Blair/Hollande steady-as-she-goes reaction</strong>. The Titanic of neo-liberal social democracy is heading for the iceberg of popular opinion.<br /><br />2) The <strong>Laurent Fabius/Franz Müntefering reaction</strong>. They know the ship's headed in the wrong direction but are only <em>pretending</em> to do but not actually <em>going</em> to do something about it. Fabius was a leading No campaigner in France, but everyone remembers his tenure as Prime Minister in the early eighties under Francois Mitterand and the austerity measures he introduced, and knows that his championing the No side was a simply a path to challenging Hollande for the 2007 presidential nomination. Frankie 'Locusts' Müntefering can call foreign investors whatever phylum, genus or species of pest, plague or vermin he wants, but he'll still support the Hartz IV and Agenda 2010 reforms German capital demands.<br /><br />3) The <strong>Cook/Livingstone reaction</strong>. They know the ship's headed in the wrong direction and don't believe the ship should be headed in that direction anyway, but in the end remain part of the crew - ship officers even - and are loyally going down with the ship. Their job is to convince everybody to stay calm even though they know that Attac France and the Linkspartei have torn a gaping hole in hull.<br /><br />4) The <strong>Oscar Lafontaine reaction</strong>. The ship's headed in the wrong direction and he knew it from the start. He loves the old boat, but he's grabbed a lift in a life-raft that's turned out to be a sturdy little dinghy in the end.<br /><br />5) The <strong>Marie-George Buffet reaction</strong>. We thought she had grabbed the same life-raft as Lafontaine, having somewhat revived the previously moribund French Communist Party by taking a leading role in the No campaign, but it seems like she's trying to row back to the Good Ship PS because while it may be sinking, it's, um, bigger than Bescancenot's catamaran.<br /></blockquote>To torture the metaphor just a little further, then - all the reports and conferences on a new social Europe are thus, ahem, just rearranging the deckchairs.<br /><br />Europe's social democrats have abandoned the Old-Labour/traditional-SPD, Keynesian, democratic socialist political terrain that had delivered them to power not a few times over the past century. It should not surprise them if forces to their left retake that terrain, and meet with similar success.Victor Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02227614963664976833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7655406.post-1129142767409654882005-10-12T20:40:00.000+02:002005-10-13T01:23:03.970+02:00DEMOCRACY COMES TO CHINA! (Well, actually just for Mongolian Cow Yogurt Super Girl)<em>Cranky aussie queen Paul Kidd, author of Buggery.org, recently <a href="http://www.buggery.org/cnt/mt/archives/000711.php">published</a> </em><em>a brief, windy-haunted-cave of a despondent posting, writing, 'Every day I think of George Orwell. Every fucking day.'<br /><br />He certainly has reason to.</em><br /><br />Within the television and mobile industry itself, those louche, tranquilising emissions that involve audience participation popularly but counterfactually known as reality TV programmes, such as <em>Big Brother</em>, <em>Pop Idols</em>, et al, are called 'participation TV'. Indeed, there is an industry conference dedicated to the topic coming up in Amsterdam in November whose programme I've been editing.<br /><br />Television channels, particularly private broadcasters, love the formats as they are very cheap to produce but massively popular, and in an era where advertising dollars are increasingly spread between thousands of media channels and publications/productions, it makes much more sense to produce a <em>Big Brother</em> than an hour-long drama such as the <em>Sopranos</em>, when the former brings in just as many viewers, if not more, for a fraction of the production costs. The latter are increasingly being produced by subscription-based channels such as HBO or the Sci-Fi Channel (and, of course, public broadcasters, who do not depend, or do not depend as much, on advertising sponsorship). The rest of the multi-channel universe is being steadily <em>Who-Wants-To-Be-A-Millionaire</em>-ified.<br /><br />Mobile operators and telcos also think that the formats are better than ice cream. As in most western European countries, mobile penetration has reached almost complete market saturation (in other words, everyone, including your technophobic gran and your six-year-old sandbox-contaminating niece has one), the operators increasingly have to find other ways of parting you from your centimes, and participation TV is crackerjack adept at convincing all you rubes to spend silly amounts of money on voting for some Turkish, off-key, Xena-the-Warrior-Princess-obsessed vampiress to win the Eurovision Song Contest.<br /><br />Sadly for both the operators, the channels, the format producers and the mobile aggregators (the companies that arrange the 'in-between' technology and content bits between the operators, TV channels and viewers, tallying votes and so on), the novelty of participation TV is wearing off. New formats, new ways of 'building communities' and new technology permitting more advanced forms of participation and content control are to some extent mitigating this tendency, but the real money is in expansion of the concept to other, much larger markets.<br /><br />Participation TV took an unusually long time to take off in North America, but this was largely due to the fact that until such shows as <em>American Idols</em> came along, short message service text messaging was all but non-existent, as local calling in most jurisdictions is essentially free. Indeed, in reverse fashion, it was the advent of participation TV that drove up-take of SMS, rather than the prevalence of SMS that drove the expansion of participation TV, as was the case in Europe. However, the format is now well established there, and participation TV sector stakeholders are in any case more interested in Asia and the Middle East, which offer massive and almost entirely unjaded audiences.<br /><br />India currently has over 50 million mobile users, but it is China which is most attractive, which has a barely untapped market of 200 million mobile subscribers, and participation TV formats are mammoths of the TV schedule. In August, the final episode of <em>Super Girl</em>, a Chinese, Pop Idols-style 'talent' contest for girls, drew 400 million viewers. Around 8 million paid RMB 0.10 (€0.01) to vote via SMS for one of the three finalists, or rather, not 'vote', but offer 'a text message of support'. Throughout the series, the word 'vote' is avoided for obvious reasons. Nonetheless, Li Yuchun, a 21-year-old girl from Sichuan whose repertoire includes the Cranberries' execrable and contractually-obligatory Irish Troubles record, 'Zombie', won with 3.5 million such 'text messages of support'. So popular has the show proved, that the Mengniu Milk Group has paid Hunan TV RMB 14 million (€1.4 million) for the naming rights to the show, which is now officially called <em>Mongolian Cow Sour Yogurt Super Girls</em>.<br /><br />Similarly, a Chinese internet portal, <a href="http://www.tom.com/">Tom Online</a>, has seen its revenues expand through the import of elements of participation TV - ring-tones and ring-back-tones, WAP, MMS and premium SMS voting-that-we-won't-call-voting. The growth was largely a result of the introduction of participation elements to certain sporting events, in particular the broadcast of the NBA finals on channel CCTV-5.<br /><br />Elsewhere, in pseudo-democracy Malaysia, where opposition candidates do occasionally win seats in the federal Parliament and state assemblies, so long as they or their parties' members have not been detained by the police, there are some 26 different locally produced reality shows. The final episode of the most popular, <em>Akademi Fantasia</em>, a participation TV format in its third season in which contestants stay in a house and take voice and dancing lessons, recently attracted 12 million SMS votes in a country with a population of 25 million.<br /><br />UK-based <a href="http://www.fremantlemedia.com">Fremantle Media</a>, one of the largest producers of participation TV formats in the world, produces some 260 programmes across 43 territories, and owns the rights to the <em>Idols</em> and <em>The Apprentice</em> formats. Its latest programme, <em>SuperStar</em>, the pan-Arab version of <em>Pop Idols</em>, is the most popular programme ever shown in the Middle East. Each of the finals for the 2003 and 2004 series received over 3 million votes from viewers. The next edition, <em>SuperStar 2005</em>, will be transmitted via Lebanese satellite channel Future TV to the Middle East and North Africa, with audiences in 17 countries able to participate.<br /><br />Despite the dearth of democracy in the region, regimes are happy to allow citizens to exercise this particular franchise that encroaches on no elite interests. Indeed, the show has even become a battleground for national prestige, no different from major sporting events. Tunisian dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali has taken to <em>SuperStar</em> like a North Korean dictator takes to South Korean movie stars, with the government taking out ads in local newspapers encouraging citizens to vote for the Tunisian candidate, seeing the contest as vital to the nation's regional standing.<br /><br />Meanwhile, in Tunisia, the sweeping privatisation of the public sector and a free-trade accord with the European Union has resulted in massive internal economic dislocation, with as much as a third of the country's manufacturing industry disappearing, according to some estimates. In response, a small Tunisian branch of the Tobin Tax and anti-neo-liberal pressure group Attac (Rassemblement pour une alternative internationale de developpement [<a href="http://www.tunisie.attac.org/">Raid-Attac Tunisie</a>]) was formed to in order to critique the free-trade accord and its local consequences. Its spokesperson, Fathi Chamki is one of the most harassed civil society dissidents in the country. He has been ill-treated, tortured and jailed, and, despite the organisation numbering only around a hundred, its members are routinely harassed and are under constant police surveillance. Their freedom of movement is severely curtailed and their phone and mail communications are intercepted. In September, the Tunisian authorities' prohibited the independent <a href="http://www.ifj.org/default.asp?index=2786&Language=EN">Tunisian Journalists' Syndicate </a>(SJT) from holding its first congress. The country's severely overcrowded jails house some 2,000 prisoners of conscience in wretched, inhumane conditions. Arrests, torture, and beatings of dissidents in broad daylight are daily occurrences and freedom of expression is non-existent. <a href="http://www.acontresens.com/livres/23.html">Philippe Squarzoni</a>, a French comic book journalist on the model of <a href="http://www.fantagraphics.com/artist/sacco/sacco.html">Joe Sacco</a> and one of the first members of the original, French <a href="http://www.france.attac.org">Attac</a>, says Ben Ali has transformed Tunisia into 'a barracks with the air of a Club Med'.<br /><br />Nonetheless, Tunisia is regularly described by the IMF as a model of liberalisation that the rest of the region must emulate. Jacques Chirac never misses an opportunity to praise the 'Tunisian Miracle' and Ben Ali himself, who has been in power since 1987.<br /><br />In this world turned upside down, citizens may vote, indeed in some instances are urged to vote but only in this MTV-style-edited, Disneyfied, parody of democracy, for <em>Pop Idols</em> and, most apropos, <em>Big Brother</em>, but not in anything that resembles a free election.<br /><br />Foreign Affairs magazine devoted its last issue to China, and one <a href="http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20050901faessay84507/bruce-bueno-de-mesquita-george-w-downs/development-and-democracy.html">article</a> [you have to pay for access, but the International Herald Tribune also <a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/16/news/edmesquita.php">published</a> a free-to-access précis of the same piece under the title, 'An open economy, a closed society'] explored how a number of countries, China in particular, have actualised more or less what the authors approve of in the way of free markets and achieved quite remarkable rates of growth - but without any regard for western parliamentary democratic norms, in contrast to the long-articulated liberal discourse that economic liberalisation undermines repressive regimes.<br /><br />This is more than instructive: Why subject ourselves, might ask the great captains of industry, the masters of the universe, to the messy, frequently social democratic products of democracy any more, when we can achieve what we want just as easily if not more so without such excesses? What utility any more has democracy? Indeed, the major institutions that currently govern us already do not pretend to have even a facade of democracy: the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, the UN Security Council, the European Commission.<br /><br />Ladies and gentlemen, this is the future, Tunisia is the future: democracy as naught but reality TV bon bon.Victor Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02227614963664976833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7655406.post-1128965024690672372005-10-10T19:21:00.000+02:002005-10-12T00:23:55.020+02:00The NED and the supremacy of human rights discourseLast week, I published a rather long-winded piece, 'Imperialists in NGO drag', on the dodgy arriere-cuisine of Reporters Sans Frontieres, which receives some of its funding from the U.S. State Department quasi-NGO, the <a href="http://www.ned.org/">National Endowment for Democracy</a> (NED).<br /><br />Over at <a href="http://politicsofdissent.blogspot.com/">Politics of Dissent</a>, a blog by an Arizona attorney, Ken Sanders, with an interest in home-brewing and wine-making and a similar predilection to your correspondent for long-form blogging, has written a decent <a href="http://politicsofdissent.blogspot.com/2005/10/imperialists-in-democratic-clothing.html">piece</a>, 'Imperialists in democratic clothing' [Honest, we don't know each other, and I only came across his piece from an e-mail blast from Z Magazine, and we certainly didn't co-ordinate our headlines. Omigod. I swear. This is worse than the senior prom, when Nicole Gusenbauer and I both wore the same mauve dress and she, like, totally deliberately spilled non-alcoholic punch on it just out of spite…] essentially extending the thesis - that hegemons are exploiting human rights groups' organisational forms to hide imperialist activity - but exploring in greater depth the activities of the NED in particular, noting that the group is: 'a darling of the neo-conservatives and shares membership with the Project for a New American Century.'<br /><br /><blockquote>'[And i]n the 1980s, the NED funded militaristic and dictatorial candidates in Panama, as well as opposition candidates in such stable democracies as Costa Rica (the opposition candidate in Costa Rica also had the endorsement of that champion of democracy, Manuel Noriega).<br /><br />'In the 1990 elections in Haiti, the NED provided significant funding to former World Bank official Marc Bazin in a failed attempt to oust the leftist Jean-Bertrand Aristide.<br /><br />'In the 1990s, the NED supported Skender Gjinushi, speaker of the Albanian parliament and former member of the Stalinist Politburo in Albania. Gjinushi was a principle organiser of the unrest that led to the 1997 fall of the democratic government in Albania, not to mention the death of over 2,000 people.<br /><br />'In Slovakia, the NED funded several initiatives that ultimately resulted in the defeat of Slovakia's freely-elected government. The NED-backed "reformers" who took over in Slovakia were largely leading officials in the Communist regime of then-Czechoslovakia.'<br /></blockquote>One must suppose, however, that at a minimum we can say that the discourse of human rights and democracy is so pervasive that imperialism has no choice but to disguise itself in such language.<br /><br />The supremacy of human rights discourse, whatever its exploitation by the U.S. State Department, is thus at least something to celebrate.<br /><br />***<br /><strong>Update:</strong> Talos, of the solid English-language Greek blog <a href="http://histologion.blogspot.com/">Histologion</a>, has written in, noting a rather glaring inaccuracy in Sanders' argument:<br /><br /><em>Gjinushi is a rather minor political figure, head of the Social Democratic Party, which got something around 4% in the last elections, and speaker of the Parliament for a long time. I'm not sure whether he was "a member of the Stalinist politburo", but I doubt it - anyway what is described as the "democratic government", was headed by Berisha, who also started his political career as a member of the Communist Party - as indeed the vast majority of Albanian politicians of any stripe and above a certain age.</em><br /><em></em><br /><em>Gjinushi was most certainly not a principle organiser of the unrest that led to the 1997 fall of the "democratic government" in Albania - a cleptocracy in fact, the likes of which would make Boris Yeltsin blush, whose fall was due to what was most certainly a popular armed insurection after a pyramid scheme in the country's deregulated banks cost most Albanians the sum total of their savings. Savings it must be said, amassed slowly and with great difficulty by the country's slaving one million immigrants since 1990. Berisha was in fact a darling of the West up to the collapse of the pyramid schemes.</em><br /><br />Nonetheless, the NED remains a wolf of an NGO.Victor Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02227614963664976833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7655406.post-1128963187560678762005-10-10T16:54:00.000+02:002005-10-10T18:53:07.630+02:00Grand Coalition accelerates SPD's demiseSo the SPD has <a href="http://news.ft.com/cms/s/0b774ffc-397b-11da-806e-00000e2511c8.html">traded</a> the Chancellorship for eight cabinet portfolios and a moderation to the CDU's plans for labour market reforms. Even accepting the new Linkspartei's (correct) rejection of joining a neo-liberal coalition with the SPD and Greens, Schroeder's hara-kiri, as I pointed out <a href="http://apostatewindbag.blogspot.com/2005/09/spd-has-upper-hand.html">before</a>, was unnecessary.<br /><br />That the SPD would rather eat their own and join with the CDU when <em>the left actually won the election</em>, than contemplate entering into a coalition with a party whose programme is little different from that of the pre-Neue-Mittel SPD, shows how strategically and ideologically bankrupt the party is.<br /><br />Well, it's their funeral. The Grand Coalition will further alienate SPD supporters, introduce reforms extending economic dislocation in the country and thus expand the audience for the Linkspartei's ideas. Far from saving the SPD, the Grand Coalition accelerates the party's demise.<br /><br />By the way, the Linkspartei scored a handsome 19.23 per cent in the <a href="http://euobserver.com/9/19991">Dresden election</a>, pushing the Free Democrats and Greens into a distant fourth and fifth place.Victor Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02227614963664976833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7655406.post-1128443772432690382005-10-04T18:27:00.000+02:002005-10-10T18:54:44.010+02:00Imperialists in NGO drag - US State Department lickspittles Reporters Sans Frontieres produce blogger handbook? Humbug!<span style="font-family:times new roman;">Christopher Hitchens, many years before he developed his gasconade, cock-rocketish oeuvre of liberalism-for-frat-boys, wrote a smart little leaflet about how beatific old Mother Theresa was in reality a condom-banning, abstinence-preaching, dictator-ass-kissing harpee of a thing. Everyone quite loved the saintly little midget, so Hitch received not a few sackfuls of hate-mail from affronted Catholic Girl Guides and the like. Who but the hardest-hearted of cynics could find something for which to criticise the beloved Saint of Calcutta's good deeds amongst the poorest of the poor?<br /><br />Although they don't quite have the public relations machine of the late Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, Reporters Sans Frontieres, the France-based NGO that fights for press freedoms around the world, has as benign a reputation, and is widely thought of as an unimpeachably righteous do-gooder non-profit on the model of Amnesty International. And they have this last week published a pamphlet of their own that will only burnish such regard.<br /><br />RSF has put out a guidebook for bloggers, aiming in particular at those who live under regimes with a less than humanist attitude towards press freedoms. <em>The Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-dissidents</em> is, according to the Guardian's </span><a href="http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/archives/2005/09/23/blogging_without_borders.html"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">bloggers</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;">, 'a cross between a motivational business guide and the internet's answer to the </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0974458902/qid=1127482320/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-7068511-4508910?v=glance&s=books"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Anarchist Cookbook</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;">', and, with the acute </span><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,7369,1578189,00.html"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">blogophobia</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> of governments such as that of China, which only last Sunday announced a new crackdown on internet-based writers and activists, increasingly resulting in the suppression and imprisonment of bloggers, there is no better time than now to issue such a pamphlet.<br /><br />So it seems to be farting in church a little to point out that RSF is actively engaged in the advancement of US and French foreign policy interests to the detriment of reporters' rights; that it white-washed of the murder of journalists in Iraq by occupation forces; supports the right-wing Venezuelan opposition, the invasion of Iraq, and the overthrow of Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Bertrand Aristide; and receives funding from not merely the State Department but also hard-right Miami-based hard-right Cuban exile groups that support anti-Castro terrorism.<br /><br />Nonetheless, all of this is true. Reporters Sans Frontieres, founded by Frenchman Robert Menard, is nothing more than imperialists in NGO drag, on the model of the AFL-CIO's </span><a href="http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?sectionid=45&itemid=5074"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">notoriously</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> Latin-America-meddling American Center for International Labor Solidarity (which replaces its forerunner, the American Institute of Free Labor Development - the American House of Labor's participation in the overthrow of Chile's Salvador Allende*).<br /><br />Plainly, in Stalinist Cuba, press freedom does not exist in the way it does in, say, northern European countries, and is thus a legitimate target of criticism from an organisation that monitors violations of press freedom around the globe. However, in its criticisms of Cuba, RSF goes beyond legitimate criticisms of the attacks on journalistic liberties into active anti-regime propagandising barely distinguishable from the biased press releases of the State Department, or even the froth-mouthed hyperbole of the Miami Cuban-exile mafia.<br /><br />Every year, RSF publishes an annual ranking of countries based on their press freedom, the Worldwide Press Freedom Index. Near the top of the most recent index, not unexpectedly, are such nations as Denmark, Finland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Canada and New Zealand, while at the bottom are such oppobrious freedom-allergics as China, Burma, Iran, Saudi Arabia and North Korea. No surprise really. What <em>is</em> surprising is that Cuba comes in dead last, apart from the aforementioned Stalinist Disneyland of Kim Jong-il.<br /><br />Now, Castro's regime has a lot to answer for, but is the level of press freedom there really almost as bad as that of North Korea? Let's have a closer look at that index, shall we? Out of 167 rankings, Cuba comes 166th, lower than China, which comes 162nd; lower than Nepal - 160th; Iraq - 148th - where, as of the end of September, according to RSF's own figures, 70 journalists had been killed by both sides; dissident-boiling Uzbekistan - 142nd; Russia - 140th; trade-union-friendly Colombia - 134th; Turkey - 114th; and - and this is quite telling - Israel, which comes in at 37th.<br /><br />But what has happened in Cuba to so frighten these defenders of press freedom? What wicked act could the Cuban authorities have performed against reporters and the media that convinces them that Cuba is the second-least-free state on Earth in terms of freedom of the press? How many journalists have they tortured and killed?<br /><br />None, actually. No boil-in-a-bag repression Uzbek-stylee; no gay Iranian bloggers hung; no cameramen sentenced to thirty years for speaking Kurdish on air and no Chinese labour activists sent to the funny farm indefinitely for printing posters denouncing poor working conditions.<br /><br />This is not to say that Cuba is without fault. As RSF says, everything from internet use to possession of a fax machine or computer requires permission and, apart from a handful of Catholic Church newsletters, there are virtually no independent publications. Indeed, one cannot really criticise the specific reason RSF finds a problem with Cuba - the arrest, trial and imprisonment of 21 dissident journalists for receiving funding from the U.S. The reporters remain in jail.<br /><br />Now, it is true that the journalists met regularly at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, receiving advice and funding and are committed to the overthrow of the Castro regime, and one may justifiably ask whether in the States journalists who had received funding and training from a foreign government committed to the destruction of the U.S. and who met regularly at the embassy of an enemy nation would be treated any differently than these Cuban reporters have, but they would certainly not have been arrested and imprisoned in most of the cuddly Scandicanadazealandian democracies - and they, surely, are the better measure of press freedom, not the United States.<br /><br />The problem is not that RSF criticises Cuba - although some Castrophiles refuse to hear anything but that Cuba is some libertarian Shangri-la and RSF rightly takes such blinkered romantics on - it is that the criticism of Cuba is out of all proportion to the level of pressures on press freedom that exist there.<br /><br />But back to that list. Israel, by the way, comes in ahead of Italy (39th), and perhaps understandably, but also ahead of Australia (41st), Japan (43rd) and South Korea (48th). Actually, in truth, Israel, like only one other country on the list, has its ranking split in two. In its Worldwide Press Freedom Index, RSF allows Israel to have two kicks at the can - <em>Israel (Israeli territory),</em> which wins 37th place, and <em>Israel (Occupied Territories),</em> which wins 116th place - which is awfully sporting of them. I wonder where Israel would fall in the listing if the two rankings were combined. Still, as bad as things are at level 116, they're still better, according to the noble RSF witnesses, than at level 127 - the Palestinian Authority.<br /><br />The other country that gets a double-ranking free kick is - shall we say it together, kids? - the United States. There is that bastion of press freedom and home of Fox News, <em>United States of America (American territory),</em> which comes in at a respectable 23rd place, just behind Belgium but ahead of Portugal (25th), South Africa (26th) and the U.K. (30th); and then there is <em>United States of America (in Iraq)</em> [note here how while conceding Israel is occupying something, the U.S. is just 'in' Iraq, like 'I just popped <em>in</em> for a visit', or 'I was over at Mrs. Gilbert's, and what did she put <em>in</em> her strudel, why candied ginger, donchaknow!'], which comes in at a woeful 108th place, sandwiched between Kyrgyzstan and Cambodia, and in the neighbourhood of the Central African Republic (104th) and Rwanda (113th) and Turkey (114th) - still better, mind you than the aforementioned Cuba, of course. Turkey, unfortunately, was unable to convince the judges to allow it both a <em>Turkey (Kurdish-journo-torturing)</em> and a <em>Turkey (non-Kurdish-journo-torturing), </em>which I think is just rotten favouritism on the part of the refs.<br /><br />Indeed, in the </span><a href="http://www.rsf.org/IMG/pdf/Am_index_Eng_2004.pdf"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">press release</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> announcing the latest index, RSF seems to forget entirely how poorly America's 'evil twin' performed in its league table, as under a headline that reads, 'The two North American giants score well', the group reports that:<br /><br /><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'A police raid in Canada on the home of journalist Juliet O'Neil and the national regulatory authority’s stand against the pan-Arab radio station Al-Jazeera and the local station CHOI FM downgraded the country to 18th place. Violations of the privacy of sources, persistent problems in granting press visas and the arrest of several journalists during anti-Bush demonstrations kept the United States (22nd) away from the top of the list.'<br /></span></blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The decision of Canada's national regulatory authority, the CRTC, was actually to approve the broadcast of Al-Jazeera - the Qatar based channel known for being the sand in the thong of Arab regimes almost as much for the calumny it attracts from the U.S., and which has just managed to sign Sir David Frost, the veteran BBC interviewer - thus RSF, the defender of press freedom, is here actually criticising the Canadian communications regulator for expanding such freedom.<br /><br />The release doesn't even mention the U.S. Army's 8 April 2003 shelling of the Palestine Hotel in Iraq, where almost all foreign journalists had been based, killing Spanish cameraman José Couso of Telecinco and Ukrainian Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk and wounding three others. In fact, on the very same day, the Iraqi offices of United Arab Emirates satellite channel Abu Dhabi TV were hit by air strikes as well, and two American air-to-surface missiles also hit Al Jazeera's office in Baghdad and killed Tariq Ayoub, a Jordanian reporter, and wounded Zouhair al-Iraqi, an Iraqi cameraman. Three missile attacks on the media in one day - oh, and add to that Nato's bombing of Radio Televizija Srbija during the air campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999, and, well, I'm not saying there's a pattern here - I'm no tin-foil-hat-wearing moonbat that thinks that just because one country's armed forces has systematically targeted television stations over and over, that there might be some conspiracy here, but you know - it bears looking into.<br /><br />But no, according to RSF's release, 'persistent problems in granting press visas' was America's gravest sin against press freedoms.<br /><br />RSF itself did actually denounce the attack on the Palestine Hotel initially, but when it came to its own investigation of the shelling, RSF's report ultimately exonerated the U.S. of all blame, resulting in the family of José Couso to attack the RSF report as a white-wash. The Couso family responded to the RSF report </span><a href="http://www.josecouso.info/article.php3?id_article=46&var_recherche=BuscarLa+familia+de+Jose+Couso+pide+a+Reporteros+Sin+Fronteras+que+se+retire+de+la+querella"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">press release</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;">, saying:<br /><br /><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'The conclusions of this report exculpate the acknowledged perpetrators of the shelling of the Palestine Hotel on the basis of the dubious impartiality of embedded reporters and the testimony of those responsible for the shelling, transferring responsibility to unidentified individuals.<br /><br />'The report was signed by a journalist, Jean Paul Mari, who has a known relationship with Col. Phillip de Camp, who acknowledged his involvement in the attack and the deaths of the journalists at the Palestine Hotel. Furthermore, the report is supported by the testimony of three journalists embedded with U.S. troops, all of them U.S. citizens; one of them, Chris Tomlinson, having worked for U.S. Army intelligence for more than seven years. None of the Spanish journalists in the hotel has been consulted for the writing of this report.<br /><br />'The report contains numerous errors, contradictions and irregularities in reference to important facts such as the location of the rooms at the hotel, the site of impact of the shell, the location of witnesses, etc…Reporters without Borders (Spanish Section) requested to join the complaint filed by the family on May 27, 2003, against those responsible for the death of José Couso. After the release of this report which, according to its version, excuses them from responsibility in the murder of the journalists at the Palestine Hotel, it is absolutely illogical and contradictory that their organization continues to be a party to the public action in the open proceedings of the National Tribunal.<br /><br />'For this reason we express the wish of the family that they withdraw their request for standing as a party to the public action in the open proceedings of the National Tribunal.'*<br /></span></blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;">In fact, RSF actually praised the invasion of Iraq and celebrated the bombing campaign, saying: 'the overthrow of the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein ended 30 years of official propaganda and has opened a new era of freedom, full of hope and uncertainty, for Iraqi journalists,' and that, 'for the Iraqi media, decades of zero press freedom ended with the bombing of the Ministry of Information on 9 April in Baghdad.'<br /><br />Apart from the organisation's contemptable white-washing of America's targeting of war correspondents, thus directly endangering the lives of journalists, and its explicit support for American imperialism, on a more prosaic level, RSF takes Turkmenistan to task, and rightly so, for having no privately-owned media, but the organisation says nothing, absolutely nothing about the undermining of public broadcasters in the United States (the Republican Congress' assaults on the funding of the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio), in the U.K. (the attacks on BBC surrounding Andrew Gilligan), in Canada (the governing Liberal's slashing of the CBC's budget by $400m, around 33 per cent of its funding) or the European Commission's allergy to German public broadcasters' spending money on new forms of diffusion of information such as the internet or via mobile. There is a concerted international attempt by the privatisation fundamentalists to undermine public broadcasting and a growing corporate concentration of the mass media and RSF says nothing about either's effect on press freedom. </span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />Lately, the organisation has taken to criticising Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, specifically for three items: physical attacks on journalists by government supporters, public protests against corporate media bias, and a new law that requires the media adhere to norms of 'social responsibility'.<br /><br />It is a twisted logic, however, as what are in fact popular and government attempts to free the media from hard-right, corporate control are portrayed as their inverse: attacks on the media. The very attempts to expand the freedom of the press in Venezuela for RSF are crimes against liberty and sufficient to warrant awarding Venezuela 90th place in its Press Freedom Index.<br /><br />The country's five largest television channels - Venevisión, Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV), Globovisión and CMT - are privately owned and so vituperatively hostile to the Chavez government that they make even Fox News look, well, fair and balanced, and moreover, nine of the ten largest newspapers are opposed to the government.<br /><br />Impartiality is a foreign concept to the television stations, who, </span><a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20030303/klein"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">according to</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> Nation journalist Naomi Klein, during the 2003 failed 'strike' by the managers and owners of the state petrol company, broadcast an average of 700 pro-strike commercials a day. Further, found Klein: </span><br /></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br /><blockquote>'[I]n the days leading up to the [failed] April coup, Venevisión, RCTV, Globovisión and Televen replaced regular programming with relentless anti-Chávez speeches, interrupted only for commercials calling on viewers to take to the streets: "Not one step backward. Out! Leave now!" The ads were sponsored by the oil industry, but the stations carried them free, as "public service announcements."' </blockquote><br />During the strike, the country's communications regulator and a local council for the rights of children and youth in the town of Tachira attempted to use the courts to force the TV stations to break their 24-hour coverage of the lock-out for at least a few hours a day in order to show children's programming - broadcasts which are mandated by the stations' licences. Nonetheless, in RSF's cuckoo, inverted world, this is yet another example of state intimidation of the media.<br /><br />According to the makers of <em>The Revolution Will Not Be Televised</em>, an award-winning documentary on the Venezuelan media's role in the abortive coup, insults, false allegations and even calls for the overthrow of Chavez were and continue to be common in the press and on TV. As the filmmakers note, a month before the coup, the El Nacional newspaper falsely and wackily reported that the Chavez government had entered into a secret deal with Hizbollah and the Iranian government, allowing Iran to build a military base in Venezuela, while the channels routinely refer to government supporters as 'Taliban' and compare Chavez to Hitler, Mussolini and Idi Amin.<br /><br />In an era when Islamist militants who publish or preach 'enticement to violence' in the UK can be deported from the country or imprisoned, it is glisteningly remarkable that in Venezuela not a single journalist has been jailed, and the TV stations have continued to broadcast their rabid anti-government propaganda.<br /><br />On a recent visit to Caracas, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero told Chavez that he had heard many criticisms in Spain of the lack of press freedom in Venezuela, but after watching just a morning's worth of the rivers of maniacal disinformation that passes for television programming and having read the day's papers, he declared that he had no doubt in his mind that there was 'full and total freedom of speech' in Venezuela.<br /><br />A former editor with CNN en Español, Andrés Izarra, interviewed by Naomi Klein believes that because the four TV stations have undermined press freedom to such an extent, they have forfeited their right to broadcast and should have their licences revoked.<br /><br />According to both Le Monde Diplomatique and Klein's Nation article, on the night of the coup, the owner of Venevisión, Gustavo Cisneros, hosted the meetings of the coup plotters at the station. The president of Venezuela's broadcasting chamber was one of the signatories to the decree dissolving the elected National Assembly - the negligee of legality in which the plotters dressed their coup d'etat. The TV networks celebrated the coup on air, but when the coup went awry, and the poor of Caracas and sections of the military rose up returning Chavez to power, the stations responded with a complete media black-out, programming only light entertainment as if nothing had changed.<br /><br />Truly, the coup was a media-military putsch, where the major media players were not merely sympathetic to the coup, or even just propagandised in its favour, but actively participated in and helped co-ordinate the event.<br /><br />It is in such a climate that reporters from these stations have come under physical assault from the poor and working classes of Venezuela, defending their president who has massively expanded the provision of social services in the country. RSF's 2004 Venezuela report cites 62 physical assaults on such journalists. However, when one examines the report, one finds that of the 62 attacks only one was by agents of the state. The rest were by 'government supporters' or in one case, merely 'apparently Chavez supporters' (RSF is thus happy to take it on hearsay that attacks are performed by certain actors without corroboration). Furthermore, when one parses the list of attacks, one is struck by the number of 'attacks' that are in fact merely journalists being 'insulted and jostled'.<br /><br />Indeed, in the most Orwellian of manoeuvres, when Venezuelans have taken to the street to protest the media bias, RSF finds such actions sufficient to include them in its list of assaults on media freedom. As RSF itself admits, most of the assaults came from government supporters during the strike, angry at the bias of the major media outlets, which, says the RSF report, 'actively backed the opposition movement, sometimes violating journalistic principles.' To be sure, many of the demonstrators attacked the right-wing journalists with stones, and this - or any form of violence towards journalists - is completely unacceptable, no matter how biased the reporters, but it must be noted that government supporters are not the same as the government, and that as problematic as such a climate is, it pales in comparison to the regular murder and imprisonment of journalists that occurs on a sadly increasing basis in many other countries.<br /><br />Since the coup, the stations have continued to operate, with no action having been taken against their directors. What the government has done, is introduce legislation that requires the stations adhere to norms of 'social responsibility', under which, media outlets that 'excus[e] or advocat[e] disrespect for lawful institutions and authorities' are to be penalised.'<br /><br />However, this tame measure aimed at reining in the corporate-putschist media barons is transformed by RSF into government harassment of the 'free' press.<br /><br />This burlesque, where a reporters' defence organisation defends instead coup-plotters, was repeated last February, on the occasion of the U.S.-French overthrow of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. RSF hailed the coup, calling the popular social-democratic leader a 'predator of press freedom', and, according to local independent documentary film-maker Kevin Pina, carefully documented attacks by Aristide supporters on opposition radio stations while paying no attention to violence on reporters from government opponents, thus helping craft the international media's 'framing' of the conflict in Haiti as one of state and state-supported violence against the media and opposition.<br /><br />Following the coup and subsequent kidnapping of Aristide, which RSF describes as a 'resignation', the organisation issued a statement declaring that press freedom had returned: 'A new wind of freedom is blowing for the capital’s radio stations.' </span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">According to </span><a href="http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAMR360382004" target="_blank"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Amnesty International</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;">, after Aristide was overthrown, paramilitaries entered Port-au-Prince and massacred thousands of poor peasants and slum dwellers perceived to be sympathetic to Aristide's Lavalas party. </span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Following the coup, Canada's RCMP reorganised and trained the Haitian National Police (HNP), who, according to the </span><a href="http://www.outofhaiti.ca/police_massacres.html"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Canada-Haiti Action Network</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> (CHAN), have continued this wave of killing. An International Crisis Group </span><a href="http://www.ijdh.org/articles/article_halfhourforhaiti_june-7-05.htm" target="_blank"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">assessment</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> reports that the HNP have continued the practices of the former Haitian army, which had been abolished by Aristide, including military operations against the capital's poorer quarters. Journalists too have come under assault, alongside Port-au-Prince's poor, with one radio reporter killed in January, but RSF says nothing at all about this.<br /><br />If we follow the money, the bricolage of dodgy imperial sugar-daddies that populate the arriere-cuisine of Robert Menard's soi-disant human rights organisation, we can perhaps understand a little more why it is that RSF has such a throbbing hard-on for Cuba and Venezuela and is deaf to the screams from Port-au-Prince's slums and radio stations.<br /><br />To begin with, for an NGO, the group is remarkably close to France's haute bourgeoisie. RSF receives the bulk of its funding from FNAC, the giant French music, electronics and book retailer; CFAO, the French-African automobile and pharmaceuticals distributor; the Hewlett Packard Foundation; French publishing house Hachette; the Electricité de France Foundation; George Soros' Open Society Institute; and France's Sanofi-Aventis, the world's third-largest pharmaceutical firm, amongst others.<br /><br />Vivendi Universal Publishing Services, a division of Vivendi, the French water-giant-cum-media-conglomerate, offers RSF promotional material, and via Saatchi & Saatchi in New York, Publicis, the Paris-based advertising behemoth, delivers marketing services to RSF gratis. </span><br /></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />The group has also received donations from Menard's personal friends, the late arms dealer Jean-Guy Lagardère, and French UMP senator Serge Dassault, the owner of the Dassault Group, a manufacturer of fighter jets. The Dassault Group also owns 82 per cent of Socpresse, which controls leading French conservative newspapers <em>Le Figaro, Valeurs Actuelles</em> and <em>L'Express</em>.<br /><br />RSF also obtains 11 per cent of its budget in direct funding from the French government, and also receives indirect funding from the U.S. via grants from the Center for a Free Cuba, an organisation that is committed to the overthrow of the Cuban government and which is financed by USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy. Amongst other activities, the NED finances the right-wing Venezuelan opposition - to the tune of some $20 million so far - and is headed by Frank Calzón, who has connections to the Miami anti-Castro exile community and was the former leader of an anti-Castro terrorist group, Abdala, which performed a number of admittedly not terribly successful actions in the U.S. in the 1970's against the Cuban football team. Subsequently, he was director of the Cuban American National Foundation, the principal Cuban-American lobby in Washington. </span><a title="Luis Posada Carriles" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Posada_Carriles"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Luis Posada Carriles</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;">, the Cuban-Venezuelan CIA-trained terrorist mastermind behind a series of hotel bombings and the 1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner in which seventy-three people were killed, claimed in a 1998 interview in the New York Times that he had received financial backing from CANF for a 1997 bombing campaign in Cuba. </span><br /></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />So this is the crowd Menard and his RSF runs with: a Shanghai of anti-Castro zealots with links to CIA-trained terrorists; the sultans of the French publishing, pharmaceutical, advertising and arms industries and France's conservative press; and the various tentacles of the U.S. State Department and the French government. With RSF's benefactors coming from such noble quarters as these, one really shouldn't be surprised at all at RSF's Cuban, Venezuelan and Haitian perfidies.<br /><br />For years, large corporations vacillated between attempting to marginalise environmental campaigners and being petrified that their campaigns were costing them market share amongst beardy Volvo drivers. Today, even the most flagrant eco-scofflaw enterprise has rebranded itself as environmentally right-on, regardless of their continued production of, say, mercury-infused lollipops. Campaigners have found this manoeuvre, of using environmentalists' own campaign strategies and language against them - a sort-of public relations jujitsu that they call 'greenwashing' - intractably difficult to counter, as the Volvo drivers return from the barricades, convinced by the corporations' reassuring words and satisfied that they have saved the world in time for tea.<br /><br />Like Shell, BP and Unilever before them, imperialists too have now developed their own form of <em>human rights</em> 'greenwashing': impersonating an NGO.<br /><br />As with Human Rights Watch and Freedom House (which both have similar conservative political and corporate ties to those of RSF), individuals with long histories in or connections to the foreign affairs departments, diplomatic corps and even military or secret services of hegemonic states have formed organisations modeled on such civil society groups as Amnesty International or Friends of the Earth, employing the same discourse of democracy, freedom and justice as that of human rights campaigners.<br /><br />These groups perform just enough good in the world - such as publishing pamphlets for bloggers and cyber-dissidents - that no one notices when they act in keeping with their original purpose: to further the interests of empire.<br /><br />* For a comprehensive overview of the history of the AFL-CIO's participation in the U.S. State Department's plans for Latin America, see </span><a href="http://www.laboreducator.org/"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Labor Educator's</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> series, </span><a href="http://www.laboreducator.org/darkpast.htm"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The AFL-CIO's Dark Past</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;">.<br /><br />** From the Spanish. From a Z Magazine </span><a href="http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID=8612"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">article</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> by Salim Lamrani, translated by Diana Barahona. </span>Victor Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02227614963664976833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7655406.post-1127391898428690262005-09-22T14:22:00.000+02:002005-09-22T14:25:53.310+02:00B.U.I.There was a <em>rather</em> bad short post posted here until recently, if you're wondering where it went. I decided to remove it and hereby swear to never again blog while under the influence.Victor Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02227614963664976833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7655406.post-1127323407880477932005-09-21T19:17:00.000+02:002005-09-22T00:06:02.953+02:00The 'dolchstosslegende' of the neo-liberal 'left'Across the Rhine, neo-liberal nabobs of the right and left, are twisting themselves into Rubik's Cubes of re-interpretation attempting to explain away Sunday's election result in Germany, like the relics of the eighties that they are.<br /><br />France's presumptive future Yankophile king, Nicolas Sarkozy, and his supporters seem to feel the result is of a piece with the recent European Consitution referendum, but not in the same way <em>la vrai gauche</em> does, according to the Guardian's France correspondent, the soggy moderate <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,1574322,00.html">Jon Henley</a>:<br /><br /><blockquote>'Patrick Devidjian, a loyal and influential Sarkozy supporter, told Libération that Ms Merkel's problem had been one of method rather than principle. "The tax reforms she proposed were totally deformed by someone (the 'professor from Heidelberg' Paul Kirchhof) who did not have the political and pedagogical qualities needed in a politician," he said. "For us, that is the real lesson - radical reforms have to be properly explained."'</blockquote><br />Just as with the referendum, it is not that voters made a rational decision, rejecting neo-liberalism, but it is merely that the subject has not been properly explained. The arrogant sense of superiority of Thatcher's children is perhaps neo-liberalism's most insufferable attribute. We are just too stupid to understand the benefits of markets, plainly.<br /><br />Meanwhile, across the floor, the Socialists haven't wasted time blaming the far left for their own defeat, just as they did in the wake of the 2002 presidential election where Socialist Lionel Jospin was locked out of the second round between Jacques Chirac and Jean-Marie Le Pen (Henley again):<br /><br /><blockquote>'The moderate French left, including most of the Socialist party's current hierarchy, were not slow to blame the rise of Oskar Lafontaine's Linkspartei - made up of ex-Communists from the east and former SPD members disappointed with the party's perceived liberal drift - for Mr Schröder's discomfiture.<br /><br />"It bears direct and complete responsibility for the failure of the left," Pierre Moscovici, a former Socialist European affairs minister, said. "Its populist rhetoric prevented the SPD from scoring as it should have done."'<br /></blockquote><br />Horseshit. First of all, the left won. There is theoretically no reason why Schroeder cannot continue to govern (as a minority government, following the Linkspartei's vote for him as Chancellor [who are they going to vote for, Merkel?]), with or without passive support from the Linke. Secondly, if it weren't for the hemorrhage of CDU votes to the Linkspartei, the CDU would have a clear majority. Thirdly, the Linkspartei's very existence forced the SPD to tack left, pretending that it was the defender of the social model, which, together with Merkel's flat tax fubar, resulted in the enormous surge in support for the SPD in the last fortnight.<br /><br />In the years following the First World War, a political fairy story developed in Germany that it was not the German army that lost the war, but in fact left-wing politicians - the so-called <em>dolchstosslegende</em> (stab-in-the-back-legend). It is as untrue today as it was then. The viability of such attacks on the real left from its social democratic Judases has long since passed. If social democrats insist on capitulation, they have no one to blame but themselves.<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,1574322,00.html"></a>Victor Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02227614963664976833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7655406.post-1127229169486917802005-09-20T17:07:00.000+02:002005-09-22T00:54:55.816+02:00Bertinotti encourages Linke to join SPD coalition?Just got a couple of press releases on our friends in Germany from Fausto Bertinotti's pan-European <a href="http://www.european-left.org/">Party of the European Left</a>. Thought y'all might like a gander.<br /><blockquote>'The German elections give a new and big outburst [Ed. - 'Outburst'? Odd choice. <em>Ah</em>, <em>Euronglish*</em>] to the party of the European Left. The Linke successfully accomplishes an unprecedented undertaking in the history of the after war Germany: that of a mass consensus given to a party which places itself to the left of the biggest social democratic party on the continent.<br /><br />'The Linke adherence to the Party of the European Left underlines the possibility and historical necessity of the growing of radical and alternative left in all European countries.'<br /></blockquote>He also notes that the first congress of the European Left Party will take place in Athens at the end of October and that Lafontaine, Bisky and Gisy will take part.<br /><br />Interestingly, Bertinotti critcises the SPD's consideration of a Grand Coalition with the CDU when the broad left won the election and seems to suggest that they consider a left coalition instead:<br /><blockquote>'The German Social Democrats face a choice of great responsibility: the clamorous defeat of the most convinced supporter of the neo-liberalist policies, the CDU of Merkel, would make the choice of a wide coalition more a dangerous social adventure, rather than a choice of stability.<br /><br />'The great success of the Linke asks the SPD to have the courage to break with the moderate and anti-social policies. After all, in different shapes, this is the problem that reformists will be facing in the whole of Europe.'<br /></blockquote>What exactly is he trying to say here? Could it be that Bertinotti is encouraging the Linkspartei to do what his own comrades in the <a href="http://www.rifondazione.it/">Partito della Rifondazione Comunista</a> have done vis-à-vis <a href="http://www.unioneweb.it/">L'Unione</a>? Or am I just reading too much into what is probably just a dig at the SPD?<br /><br />Nonetheless, a release from the Linke I received at the same time all but explicitly (and quite rightly) rules out the possibility:<br /><blockquote>'The question of the future German government is open. There are three main variants: so-called street-light-coalitions of SPD, the Greens and FDP or CDU/CSU, FDP and the Greens as well as a grand coalition of SPD and CDU/CSU. The postponed voting in one Dresden constituency on 2 October with three seats can bring no principal change to the general picture. Be it that as it may, the Left Party.PDS will get a good chance to win a higher profile as the only consistent opposition force to the neo-liberal orientation of the German political class.'<br /><br />'As Gregor Gysi stated at a press conference after the vote, the party will support neither the neo-liberal politics of Schröder, nor of Merkel.'<br /></blockquote><p>The release, from Helmut Ettinger and Helmut Scholz of the party's international department, also offers a more fleshed-out geographic breakdown of the party's support:<br /></p><blockquote><p>'Under difficult conditions, with a new partner, being fought by all the other parties and large parts of the media, it reached its main goal to enter parliament with its own group. The party could more than double its result of four per cent in 2002. The 8.7 per cent of the vote and 54 seats it received are an increase of 4.7 per cent and 52 seats.<br /><br />'The best news is that the co-operation with the WASG worked fully, bringing about a result of a new quality, going far beyond the sum of the two organisations’ expected individual scores. Highly important is the overcoming of the five percent hurdle in most of the country, also in six of the ten lander of western Germany. In the western lander the party scored altogether 4.9 per cent of the vote Top results have been achieved in the Saarland (Oskar Lafontaine’s homeland) with 18.5 per cent, Bremen with 8.3 per cent or Hamburg with 6.3 per cent. In the East the Left Party.PDS received 25.4 per cent.<br /><br />'Even in the lander with government participation, highly disputed among its followers, the Left Party.PDS got large increases: in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania 7.3 per cent (23.7 per cent altogether) and in Berlin five per cent (16.4 per cent altogether). The only two PDS deputies in 2002-2005, Petra Pau and Gesine Lötzsch, won their constituencies in Berlin again. The third direct mandate was taken by Gregor Gysi also in Berlin. [A total of] 30 deputies have been elected in the East, 24 in the west of the country.'<br /><br />'This election has changed political life in Germany. For the first time since the 1950s there is a nation wide political force to the left of the SPD. The Left Party.PDS will continue fighting the dismantling of the German welfare state, the redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich, the sending of German troops into military action abroad.'</p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><p></p><p>* <strong>Euronglish</strong>: <em>adj.</em> 1. Of or relating to Euronglish. 2. Mechanical dialect of English spoken by fluent but non-native English speakers to other fluent but non-native English speakers, esp. in Europe. As more individuals speak Euronglish than its parent language, persistent differences between it and English 'proper' cannot said to be 'wrong', e.g., the word 'touristic'. See <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europanto_language"><em>Europanto</em></a>.</p><blockquote><p></p></blockquote><blockquote></blockquote><blockquote></blockquote>Victor Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02227614963664976833noreply@blogger.com0